CODEWITHSUNDEEP
djangodjango-templatesdjango-template-filters
artem
artem

Reputation: 16787

Django templates - split string to array

I have a model field, which stores a list of URLs (yeah, I know, that's wrong way) as url1\nurl2\nurl3<...>. I need to split the field into an array in my template, so I created the custom filter:

@register.filter(name='split')
def split(value, arg):
    return value.split(arg)

I use it this way:

{% with game.screenshots|split:"\n" as screens %}
        {% for screen in screens %}
            {{ screen }}<br>
        {% endfor %}
    {% endwith %}

but as I can see, split doesn't want to work: I get output like url1 url2 url3 (with linebreaks if I look at the source). Why?

Upvotes: 55

Views: 103710

Answers (5)

Tim van der Leeuw
Tim van der Leeuw

Reputation: 406

Apart from whether your original solution was the right approach, I guess the original code did not work because the meaning of the \n is not the same in Python code as it is in HTML: In Python code it means the escaped newline character, in HTML it is just the two separate characters \ and n. So passing as input parameter \n from the HTML template to the Python code is equivalent to splitting on the Python string \\n: a literal \ followed by a n.

Upvotes: 1

ryanjdillon
ryanjdillon

Reputation: 18978

I wanted to split a list of words to get a word count, and it turns out there is a filter for that:

{{ value|wordcount }}

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#wordcount

Upvotes: 1

Chris Pratt
Chris Pratt

Reputation: 239430

Django intentionally leaves out many types of templatetags to discourage you from doing too much processing in the template. (Unfortunately, people usually just add these types of templatetags themselves.)

This is a perfect example of something that should be in your model not your template.

class Game(models.Model):
    ...
    def screenshots_as_list(self):
        return self.screenshots.split('\n')

Then, in your template, you just do:

{% for screen in game.screenshots_as_list %}
    {{ screen }}<br>
{% endfor %}

Much more clear and much easier to work with.

Upvotes: 108

peterp
peterp

Reputation: 3165

Functionality already exists with linkebreaksbr:

{{ value|linebreaksbr }}

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#linebreaksbr

Upvotes: 16

artem
artem

Reputation: 16787

Hm, I have partly solved this problem. I changed my filter to:

@register.filter(name='split')
def split(value, arg):
    return value.split('\n')

Why it didn't work with the original code?

Upvotes: 8

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