11.1.4 Functions

These are useful if you want more control, or if you want to employ some of the algorithms implemented in this module in other circumstances.

parse (fp): Parse a query in the environment or from a file (default sys.stdin).

parse_qs (qs): parse a query string given as a string argument (data of type application/x-www-form-urlencoded).

parse_multipart (fp, pdict)

parse input of type multipart/form-data (for file uploads). Arguments are fp for the input file and pdict for the dictionary containing other parameters of content-type header

Returns a dictionary just like parse_qs() keys are the field names, each value is a list of values for that field. This is easy to use but not much good if you are expecting megabytes to be uploaded - in that case, use the FieldStorage class instead which is much more flexible. Note that content-type is the raw, unparsed contents of the content-type header.

Note that this does not parse nested multipart parts - use FieldStorage for that.

parse_header (string): parse a header like Content-type into a main content-type and a dictionary of parameters.

test (): robust test CGI script, usable as main program. Writes minimal HTTP headers and formats all information provided to the script in HTML form.

print_environ (): format the shell environment in HTML.

print_form (form): format a form in HTML.

print_directory (): format the current directory in HTML.

print_environ_usage (): print a list of useful (used by CGI) environment variables in HTML.

escape (s[, quote]): convert the characters ``&'', ``<'' and ``>'' in string s to HTML-safe sequences. Use this if you need to display text that might contain such characters in HTML. If the optional flag quote is true, the double quote character (") is also translated; this helps for inclusion in an HTML attribute value, e.g. in ``<A HREF="...">''.

guido@CNRI.Reston.Va.US