Templates

The Temp Class

The Temp class is instantiated as follows:

Temp(template, **kwargs)

Here, "template" is the complete text of a template (as returned, for instance, by file.read()). Following "template", there is a set of keyword arguments, where the left-hand-side indicates a variable name, and the right-hand-side a value. Keyword arguments can either be passed explicitly, like so:

temp = Temp(template, one=1, two=2)
print temp

... or one could choose to construct an argument dictionary first:

mydict = {
                        "one": 1,
                        "two": 2
                }
temp = Temp(template, **mydict)
print temp

In the rest of this manual, we will frequently refer to these keyword arguments as the "namespace" of a template. The reason for this terminology will become clear in the following sections.

The Temp object is rendered whenever its __repr__() method is called - i.e. whenever the template needs to be converted to a string. In the example above, this happens invisibly in the line print temp, but it can be done more explicitly through repr(temp) or just plain `temp`, which will both return the rendered string. The template is re-rendered every time this happens.

A Temp object can also be rendered by calling it like a function:

temp = Temp(template, one=1, two=2)
print temp(one=3, two=4)

The keyword arguments passed to the call "over-ride" the keyword arguments passed during the object's instantiation.

The File Class

Cubictemp also contains a small helper class named "File". It wraps the Temp class to ease a common usage scenario: loading a template from a file. The File class is instantiated as follows:

File(path, **kwargs)

The "path" argument is the full path to a Cubictemp template. The File class also makes reading exceptions a bit more convenient by pre-pending the template file path to error messages.