6.1. User input

The REQUEST variable is a dictionary representing the query string if the script is called with the HTTP GET method, or the fields of a form submitted with the HTTP POST method

REQUEST keys are the name of the fields. The values are the value of the field

  • as a string,
  • or a list of strings if the field name ends with [] (if it comes from a <SELECT MULTIPLE> form field for instance)

Suppose you have an HTML form such as : 

<form action="myScript.py">
  Spam <input name="spam">
  <br><select multiple name="animal[]">
  <option value="dog">Dog
  <option value="cat">Cat
  <option value="frog">Frog
  </select>
  <br><input type="submit" value="Ok">
</form>

In myScript.py the input would be displayed with : 

print "<br>Spam is ",REQUEST["spam"]
if REQUEST.has_key("animal"):
    print "<br>Animal is ",str(REQUEST["animal"])

Access to these data is available through a shortcut, consisting in the underscore _ prepended to the field name. The code above could be written in this simpler way : 

print "<br>Spam is ",_spam
if REQUEST.has_key("animal"):
    print "<br>Animal is ",str(_animal)

The underscore is introduced to reduce the risks of naming conflicts with Python reserved words or with the name of frequently used modules