[mod_python] CGI to mod_python -- what's the best way?

Victor -

Rather than invent ways to deal with legacy CGI code, I would bite the
bullet and rewrite the code without the use of "print". There are too many
subtle gotchas with simulating CGI...

Grisha



On Sun, 8 Apr 2001, Victor Muslin wrote:

>
> Sorry for a long message, but this requires a bit of explanation. I
> appreciate your patience in advance.
>
> I have a bunch of python legacy code that used to be part of a large
> CGI-based system. This code simply used print statements to output HTML as
> follows:
>
> def foo():
>          print 'html1'
>          print 'html2'
>
> Now I want to convert CGI to mod_python, but I would like to re-use the
> legacy code with as little re-writing as possible (obviously the legacy
> code is a lot lengthier and more complicated than the example above). I am
> using the publisher module, which requires my code to return a string
> containing all of the HTML. So I thought I would be clever and do something
> like this:
>
> import sys, cStringIO
> def handler(req):
>          out =  sys.stdout = StringIO()
>          foo()
>          return out
>
> This works great as long as the second request does not arrive before the
> first one is done. Otherwise, the output gets screwed up. Since "out" is a
> local variable, each request has its own instance, but sys.stdout is a
> global. When the second request arrives, sys.stdout gets reassigned and the
> rest of the output produced by print statements in the foo() function goes
> to the new StringIO object. For example, if the second request arrives and
> gets executed between the two print statements of the first request, then
> the first request's output could be  'html1\n' and the second request's
> output could be 'html2\nhtml1\nhtml2\n'.
>
> Has anyone dealt with such a situation? Any clever suggestion would be
> appreciated as I hate to have to go into all the legacy code and change it
> to something like this:
>
> def foo():
>          out = 'html1\n'
>          out = out + 'html2\n'
>          return out
>
> def handler(req):
>          return foo()
>
> Thanks in advance.
> __________________________________________________________________________________
> Victor Muslin      The power of accurate observation is frequently called
>                           cynicism by those who don't have it.
>                                        - George Bernard Shaw
>