clever

I've been experimenting with generating HTML for reports. It's pretty easy to do - writing a text file is more or less trivial in Python. Something I had struggled with is having large amounts of HTML text with placeholder variables. It gets unwieldy if you want to make little edits. I ran across this in the Python online documentation:

http://docs.python.org/howto/webservers.html#templates

I had been doing this in my code:

myvariable = "here"
htmltext = "imagine this is long html %s" % myvariable

which would make htmltext be "imagine this is long html here".

The issue is that my HTML is often super long (tables) and making small edits and making sure my variables are in line is annoying. The way they did this in the link is clever.

myvariable = "here"
htmltext = "imagine this is long html %s"
result = htmltext % myvariable

Now I can separate things out for readability. I should read the documentation more often!