Dynamic Web content and forms processing in Python

Execution starts here. The first order of business is to write a header line and blank line that informs the Web server that we intend to generate a page of HTML.

# - - -   m a i n

def main():
    '''Main program.
    '''
    print 'Content-type: text/html'
    print

We'll use the ElementTree module to build the output Web page. Refer to Section 5.1, “XHTML to be generated” for the structure of the HTML we are building here.

    html  =  et.Element ( 'html' )
    page  =  et.ElementTree ( html )
    head  =  et.SubElement ( html, 'head' )
    title  =  et.SubElement ( head, 'title' )
    title.text  =  'Form output test'

    body  =  et.SubElement ( html, 'body' )
    h1  =  et.SubElement ( body, 'h1' )
    h1.text  =  'Form output test'

Next we'll get the FieldStorage instance and use its .keys() method to get a list of all the incoming control names. We'll sort the control names so they always appear in alphabetical order.

    form  =  cgi.FieldStorage()
    nameList  =  form.keys()
    nameList.sort()

This loop goes through the control names and, for each one, calls the showControl() function to add a div element to the page body, displaying the value of that control.

    for cName in nameList:
        showControl ( body, form, cName )

Finally, we use the ElementTree.write() method to send the HTML for the page to the standard output stream.

    page.write ( sys.stdout )