# PTL: Python Template Language

# Introduction

PTL is the templating language used by Quixote. Most web templating languages embed a real programming language in HTML, but PTL inverts this model by merely tweaking Python to make it easier to generate HTML pages (or other forms of text). In other words, PTL is basically Python with a novel way to specify function return values.

Specifically, a PTL template is designated by inserting a `[plain]` or `[html]` modifier after the function name. The value of expressions inside templates are kept, not discarded. If the type is `[html]` then non-literal strings are passed through a function that escapes HTML special characters.

# Plain text templates

Here's a sample plain text template:

    def foo [plain] (x, y = 5):
        "This is a chunk of static text."
        greeting = "hello world" # statement, no PTL output
        print 'Input values:', x, y
        z = x + y
        """You can plug in variables like x (%s)
    in a variety of ways.""" % x

        "\n\n"
        "Whitespace is important in generated text.\n"
        "z = "; z
        ", but y is "
        y
        "."

Obviously, templates can't have docstrings, but otherwise they follow Python's syntactic rules: indentation indicates scoping, single-quoted and triple-quoted strings can be used, the same rules for continuing lines apply, and so forth. PTL also follows all the expected semantics of normal Python code: so templates can have parameters, and the parameters can have default values, be treated as keyword arguments, etc.

The difference between a template and a regular Python function is that inside a template the result of expressions are saved as the return value of that template. Look at the first part of the example again:

    def foo [plain] (x, y = 5):
        "This is a chunk of static text."
        greeting = "hello world" # statement, no PTL output
        print 'Input values:', x, y
        z = x + y
        """You can plug in variables like x (%s)
    in a variety of ways.""" % x

Calling this template with `foo(1, 2)` results in the following string:

    This is a chunk of static text.You can plug in variables like x (1)
    in a variety of ways.

Normally when Python evaluates expressions inside functions, it just discards their values, but in a `[plain]` PTL template the value is converted to a string using `str()` and appended to the template's return value. There's a single exception to this rule: `None` is the only value that's ever ignored, adding nothing to the output. (If this weren't the case, calling methods or functions that return `None` would require assigning their value to a variable. You'd have to write `dummy = list.sort()` in PTL code, which would be strange and confusing.)

The initial string in a template isn't treated as a docstring, but is just incorporated in the generated output; therefore, templates can't have docstrings. No whitespace is ever automatically added to the output, resulting in `...text.You can ...` from the example. You'd have to add an extra space to one of the string literals to correct this.

The assignment to the `greeting` local variable is a statement, not an expression, so it doesn't return a value and produces no output. The output from the `print` statement will be printed as usual, but won't go into the string generated by the template. Quixote directs standard output into Quixote's debugging log; if you're using PTL on its own, you should consider doing something similar. `print` should never be used to generate output returned to the browser, only for adding debugging traces to a template.

Inside templates, you can use all of Python's control-flow statements:

    def numbers [plain] (n):
        for i in range(n):
            i
            " " # PTL does not add any whitespace

Calling `numbers(5)` will return the string `"1 2 3 4 5 "`. You can also have conditional logic or exception blocks:

    def international_hello [plain] (language):
        if language == "english":
            "hello"
        elif language == "french":
            "bonjour"
        else:
            raise ValueError, "I don't speak %s" % language

# HTML templates

Since PTL is usually used to generate HTML documents, an `[html]` template type has been provided to make generating HTML easier.

A common error when generating HTML is to grab data from the browser or from a database and incorporate the contents without escaping special characters such as '<' and '&'. This leads to a class of security bugs called "cross-site scripting" bugs, where a hostile user can insert arbitrary HTML in your site's output that can link to other sites or contain JavaScript code that does something nasty (say, popping up 10,000 browser windows).

Such bugs occur because it's easy to forget to HTML-escape a string, and forgetting it in just one location is enough to open a hole. PTL offers a solution to this problem by being able to escape strings automatically when generating HTML output, at the cost of slightly diminished performance (a few percent).

Here's how this feature works. PTL defines a class called `htmltext` that represents a string that's already been HTML-escaped and can be safely sent to the client. The function `htmlescape(string)` is used to escape data, and it always returns an `htmltext` instance. It does nothing if the argument is already `htmltext`.

If a template function is declared `[html]` instead of `[text]` then two things happen. First, all literal strings in the function become instances of `htmltext` instead of Python's `str`. Second, the values of expressions are passed through `htmlescape()` instead of `str()`.

`htmltext` type is like the `str` type except that operations combining strings and `htmltext` instances will result in the string being passed through `htmlescape()`. For example:

    >>> from quixote.html import htmltext
    >>> htmltext('a') + 'b'
    <htmltext 'ab'>
    >>> 'a' + htmltext('b')
    <htmltext 'ab'>
    >>> htmltext('a%s') % 'b'
    <htmltext 'ab'>
    >>> response = 'green eggs & ham'
    >>> htmltext('The response was: %s') % response
    <htmltext 'The response was: green eggs &amp; ham'>

Note that calling `str()` strips the `htmltext` type and should be avoided since it usually results in characters being escaped more than once. While `htmltext` behaves much like a regular string, it is sometimes necessary to insert a `str()` inside a template in order to obtain a genuine string. For example, the `re` module requires genuine strings. We have found that explicit calls to `str()` can often be avoided by splitting some code out of the template into a helper function written in regular Python.

It is also recommended that the `htmltext` constructor be used as sparingly as possible. The reason is that when using the htmltext feature of PTL, explicit calls to `htmltext` become the most likely source of cross-site scripting holes. Calling `htmltext` is like saying "I am absolutely sure this piece of data cannot contain malicious HTML code injected by a user. Don't escape HTML special characters because I want them."

Note that literal strings in template functions declared with `[html]` are htmltext instances, and therefore won't be escaped. You'll only need to use `htmltext` when HTML markup comes from outside the template. For example, if you want to include a file containing HTML:

    def output_file [html] ():
        '<html><body>' # does not get escaped
        htmltext(open("myfile.html").read())
        '</body></html>'

In the common case, templates won't be dealing with HTML markup from external sources, so you can write straightforward code. Consider this function to generate the contents of the `HEAD` element:

    def meta_tags [html] (title, description):
        '<title>%s</title>' % title
        '<meta name="description" content="%s">\n' % description

There are no calls to `htmlescape()` at all, but string literals such as `<title>%s</title>` have all be turned into `htmltext` instances, so the string variables will be automatically escaped:

    >>> t.meta_tags('Catalog', 'A catalog of our cool products')
    <htmltext '<title>Catalog</title>
      <meta name="description" content="A catalog of our cool products">\n'>
    >>> t.meta_tags('Dissertation on <HEAD>',
    ...             'Discusses the "LINK" and "META" tags')
    <htmltext '<title>Dissertation on &lt;HEAD&gt;</title>
      <meta name="description"
       content="Discusses the &quot;LINK&quot; and &quot;META&quot; tags">\n'>
    >>>

Note how the title and description have had HTML-escaping applied to them. (The output has been manually pretty-printed to be more readable.)

Once you start using `htmltext` in one of your templates, mixing plain and HTML templates is tricky because of `htmltext`'s automatic escaping; plain templates that generate HTML tags will be double-escaped. One approach is to just use HTML templates throughout your application. Alternatively you can use `str()` to convert `htmltext` instances to regular Python strings; just be sure the resulting string isn't HTML-escaped again.

Two implementations of `htmltext` are provided, one written in pure Python and a second one implemented as a C extension. Both versions have seen production use.

# PTL modules

PTL templates are kept in files with the extension .ptl. Like Python files, they are byte-compiled on import, and the byte-code is written to a compiled file with the extension `.pyc`. Since vanilla Python doesn't know anything about PTL, Quixote provides an import hook to let you import PTL files just like regular Python modules. The standard way to install this import hook is by calling the `enable_ptl()` function:

    from quixote import enable_ptl
    enable_ptl()

(Note: if you're using ZODB, always import ZODB before installing the PTL import hook. There's some interaction which causes importing the TimeStamp module to fail when the PTL import hook is installed; we haven't debugged the problem. A similar problem has been reported for BioPython and win32com.client imports.)

Once the import hook is installed, PTL files can be imported as if they were Python modules. If all the example templates shown here were put into a file named `foo.ptl`, you could then write Python code that did this:

    from foo import numbers
    def f():
        return numbers(10)

You may want to keep this little function in your `PYTHONSTARTUP` file:

    def ptl():
        try:
            import ZODB
        except ImportError:
            pass
        from quixote import enable_ptl
        enable_ptl()

This is useful if you want to interactively play with a PTL module.