Hello. Been studying Python for about a week now. I did a quick read of the tutorial in the manual and I'm reading Programming Python by Mark Lutz. I'm still getting used to the Python syntax, but I'm able to pretty much follow what is being said. But tonight Lutz was talking about implementing a database on a website and threw out this piece in his code:
<tr><th>key<td><input type=text name=key value="%(key)s"> That last bit is the bit that throws me: %(keys)s He explains this so: "The only feat of semimagic it relies on is using a record's attribute dictionary (__dict__) as the source of values when applying string formatting to the HTML reply template string in the last line of the script. Recall that a %(key)code replacement target fetches a value by key from a dictionary: >>> D = {'say': 5, 'get': 'shrubbery'} >>> D['say'] 5 >>> S = '%(say)s => %(get)s' % D >>> S '5 => shrubbery' " Hmmmmm... I understand how D['say'] gets you 5, But I still don't understand the line after the 5. How is the character 's' some special code? And I don't get what is going on with the % character. I'm used to it's use in c-style formatting, but this just seems so bizarre. I can tell that the key is being replaced by it's value in the string, but I don't know how that is being done. TIA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list