web.input

##web.input

Problem

You want user data from a form, or a url encoded parameter.

Solution

The web.input() method returns a web.storage object (a dictionary-like object) that contains the variables from the url (in a GET) or in the http header (in a POST). For example, if you go to the page http://example.com/test?id=10, on the Python backend you’ll want to extract that the id=10. Using web.input(), this becomes trivial:

class SomePage:
    def GET(self):
        user_data = web.input()
        return "<h1>" + user_data.id + "</h1>"

Sometimes you may want to specify a default variable, in case none is given. The same code with a default value for x:

class SomePage:
    def GET(self):
        user_data = web.input(id="no data")
        return "<h1>" + user_data.id + "</h1>"

Note that the web.input() values will be strings even if there are numbers passed to it.

What if you pass several of the same variable names, like this:

foobarbaz

You need to let web.input know to expect multiple inputs, or it will clobber all but one. Pass the default value of a list to web.input and it will work correctly. For example, going to http://example.com?id=10&id=20:

class SomePage:
    def GET(self):
        user_data = web.input(id=[])
        return "<h1>" + ",".join(user_data.id) + "</h1>"