bottle python rendering variable as text and not html

Question

I'm having an issues with bottle python where I have the following code

import glob
import os
from bottle import run, route, error, template
from Find_Posts import hyperlink_postnames

currentdir = os.getcwd()

def hyperlink_postnames():
    hyperlink_filelist = []
    os.chdir(currentdir + "\\Blog_Posts\\")

    for files in glob.glob("*.txt"):
        hyperlink_filelist.append('<a href = "/blog/' + files + '"' + '>' + str(os.path.splitext(files)[0]) + '</a>')
    return  hyperlink_filelist

which returns the following list

['<a href = "/blog/post1.txt">post1</a>', '<a href = "/blog/post2.txt">post2</a>', '<a href = "/blog/post3.txt">post3</a>', '<a href = "/blog/post4.txt">post4</a>', '<a href = "/blog/post5.txt">post5</a>', '<a href = "/blog/post6.txt">post6</a>']

which is in turn fed to the following bottlepy route:

@route('/blog/')
def postnames():
    postlist = hyperlink_postnames()
    tpl_out = template('blogroll', postlist = postlist)
    return  tpl_out

which is fed into the blogroll.tpl template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<div>

<p><b>Blog Roll</b></p>

%for postlist in postlist:
    <li> {{ postlist }}
%end

</div>

my problem is when I render the template in the browser it turns the postlist variable in the template into plain text and not html (which is what's written inside the list), However if I change the bottle code to read like this (bypassing the template) it renders the postlist variable as html but not inside the template which makes the code useless:

@route('/blog/')
def postnames():
    postlist = hyperlink_postnames()
    tpl_out = template('blogroll', postlist = postlist)
    return  postlist #return the variable directly bypassing the template renders the list as html

does anyone have any ideas as to why this happening?

Martijn Pieters Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-02T14:06:51

HTML special characters are escaped automatically to prevent XSS attacks.

Use an exclamation mark at the start of your template statement to indicate that you really want to include HTML:

%for postlist in postlist:
    <li> {{ !postlist }}
%end

See the documentation on inline statements.

bottle python rendering variable as text and not html

1 Answers