I'm sorry you are getting so frustrated. There's obviously a language barrier here, but also your frustration is preventing you from thinking clearly. You need to take a step back, breath, and re-read everything that's been written to you on this thread. All your questions that can be answered have been answered. If you are being paid to develop this, then we don't want to do your work for you since we're not the ones being paid. If you're doing this for a class assignment, then again we don't want to do it for you because that would defeat the purpose of your education. But if you're willing to learn, then I think the others have said on this thread will help you learn it.
You can't learn Python by developing CGI scripts and running them on the server. You need to try out snippets of code in an interactive way. You've been told how to do this, and you don't need IDLE. Although nothing prevents you from installing IDLE on your local machine. I hope you have the python interpreter on your local workstation. If not, download it and install it. You will need it. Use the python standard library reference online (or download it). You will need it. On 01/22/2013 08:21 AM, Ferrous Cranus wrote: > Why the hell > > pin = int ( '/home/nikos/public_html/index.html' ) > > fails? because it has slashes in it? That line fails because the string you passed it simply cannot be parsed into a number. Just for simplicity's sake here, suppose we define a number as any number of digits, 0-9, followed by a '.' or a ',' depending on locale, and some more digits, 0-9. This is very simplistic but it will server our purpose for this example. So given that a number is defined as above, we expect that we can parse the following strings: int('123.433') == int(123.433) == 123 but '/home/nikos/public_html/index.html' contains nothing that is recognizable as a number. There are no 0-9 digits in it, no periods or commas. So rather than returning 0, which would be absolutely incorrect, int() throws an exception because you've passed it a string which does not contain a recognizable number. If you really want to get a number to identify a string you'll have to create a hash of some kind. You were on the right track with hashlib. Except that int() again cannot work with the hash object because nothing in the hash object's string representation looks like a number. If you would follow the link you've already been given on the documentation for hashlib you'd find that the object returned by md5 has methods you can call to give you the hash in different forms, including a large number. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list