6.3. Environment data

Access to the HTTP environment is provided through global variables available in the script's namespace :

1. Read-only variables
   • REQUEST_HANDLER is an object representing the request ; a useful attribute is client_address, a 2-element tuple with client IP address and port, for example ('127.0.0.1', 1825)
   • ENVIRON is a dictionary with the CGI environment variables : SERVER-SOFTWARE, REQUEST-METHOD, QUERY-STRING,, etc.
   • HEADERS is a dictionary with the HTTP headers sent by the browser : the key is the header name, the value is the header's value. For instance HEADERS["accept-language"] will return the value of the accept-language header
   • ACCEPTED_LANGUAGES is a list of languages accepted by the user's browser, ordered by preference. The items are two-character strings identifying the language, according to the ISO 639 codification (en for English, fr for French, etc)
   • COOKIE is a dictionary-like SimpleCookie object (in Python Cookie module) that stores the cookies sent by the web browser with the HTTP request (see the section on cookies)
   • Role() is a function that returns the user's role, as defined in the built-in user management framework (see the chapter on authentication)
   • THIS is an instance of the class Target (in k_target.py) representing the current script
2. Read-write variables
   • SET_COOKIE is another SimpleCookie object to which you can set keys and values which will be stored by the web browser as cookies (see the section on cookies)
   • RESPONSE is a dictionary in which you'll set values for the response header that will be sent to the client. This dictionary is insensitive to the case of the keys : RESPONSE['Content-type'] and RESPONSE['CONTENT-type'] return the same result

The list of built-in names is described in the namespace section