When dynamically building HTML with inline JavaScript you HAVE to escape your JavaScript code with HTML comments in order to get it to validate as XHTML1.1 like the example below or else the HTML elements will cause the Validator to choke.

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Ever find yourself wishing for the modulo operator (%) in Django templates? I did. Its easy enough to create your own custom filter so why not do it?

Caveat: I couldn't figure out how to get the filter to accept two arguments to do the modulo test against so I defaulted the test value to zero. If there is a way to add a second argument I would love to add that to the code.

In the templatetags directory of your Django install, add a file named 'mod.py'. In that file add the following code:

from django import template
register = template.Library()

def mod(value, arg):
    if value % arg == 0:
        return True
    else:
        return False

register.filter('mod', mod)


In your template use the mod filter like this:

...
{% load mod %}
...
<tr bgcolor="{% if forloop.counter|mod:2 %}#cccccc{% else %}#ffffff">
...

This will alternate every other row's background color between gray and white.

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I don't know why this function is not more well known or why it never comes up when I do a search for "javascript round method", but I have always had a terrible time coming up with a reliable floating-point rounding function for JavaScript that holds a definite number of places. Usually the search comes back with somebody's custom method for rounding to a specific number of digits that has flaws of some sort. The built-in toFixed() method fixes all of this. It is a built in method of all JavaScript Numeric types. For example:

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My early background in programming is in ColdFusion. Since I found python I do not really use ColdFusion for much any more but it is still one of my favorite languages. One of the features I missed most about ColdFusion is the DateFormat() built-in function. Python's default date formatting syntax is arcane in my opinion and very difficult to remember at best. I always find myself going back to the documentation to figure it out. Worry no more. Introducing ... DateFormat() for python based on the ColdFusion DateFormat() function. It is not a terribly unique name by any means but it takes all the guess work out of remembering how to format a date by using a string mask to show how you want the date to appear. The following values can be used in the mask:

• d: Day of the month as digits; no leading zero for single-digit days.
• dd: Day of the month as digits; leading zero for single-digit days.
• ddd: Day of the week as a three-letter abbreviation.
• dddd: Day of the week as its full name.
• m: Month as digits; no leading zero for single-digit months.
• mm: Month as digits; leading zero for single-digit months.
• mmm: Month as a three-letter abbreviation.
• mmmm: Month as its full name.
• yy: Year as last two digits; leading zero for years less than 10.
• yyyy: Year represented by four digits.

The following masks tell how to format the full date and cannot be combined with other masks:

• short: equivalent to m/d/yy.
• medium: equivalent to mmm d, yyyy.
• long: equivalent to mmmm d, yyyy.
• full: equivalent to dddd, mmmm d, yyyy.

Example usage is:

Download it here

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I recently read a post that contends that an unzip function is unneeded in python. His argument is that you don't need unzip because of the following:

Oh, of course! How intuitive! OK, no more sarcasm. To me that seems to be very un-pythonic. I never would have thought to use *zip() inside of zip() to get the unzipped version. I would however have expected to be able to write unzip() and get a result. I decided to see how easy it would be to create an unzip() of my own so I fired this off just to see.

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I tend to get chided when I mention to my developer friends that I prefer to work in Python if I can. Python is a general purpose language that helps me get my personal projects done faster with less coding. I'll follow up with a post on things I like and dislike about Python on another post later.

At work we work exclusively on Microsoft SharePoint Server with C#. One of our developers was trying to write a routine that would write 50MB of data from MS SQL Server to Excel. Using C# our guy couldn't get the run time to be under 30 minutes. To me, 50MB isn't a lot of data. There's no reason that it should take that long.

A quick Google search to find a Python module to connect to MS SQL Server turned up PyODBC. With the excellent pyExcelerator library installed I was ready for battle. Fifteen minutes† and thirty lines of code later (including timing code) I had a quick prototype in Python working that runs in 49 seconds. Down from 30 minutes, that's a 3573% speed increase. Needless to say my co-workers were all dumbfounded that Python would be so efficient over Microsoft's flagship language. I admit that I was pleasantly surprised as well but mostly just so that I wouldn't have to eat crow when it didn't work ;)

†The only reason it took fifteen minutes was because I had to familiarize myself with PyODBC and how to execute stored procedures with it. After fetching the data it was only two simple for loops to get the data written.

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