[Zope] way to cleanup form input text?

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

Write an external method in python that uses regsub.sub or regsub.gsub
functions.  This allows you to do regular expression substitutions.

regsub.sub does a replace on the first match only
regsub.gsub does a replace on all matches

Ex:

import regsub
def process_a_string(self):
	"""Processes a string, where string is passed as self"""
	result=regsub.gsub('[ \t][ \t]+', ' ', self) 	#Filters all
duplicate spaces and 
	return result						#tabs down
to one space char

where somestring is our example attribute call this in dtml:

<dtml-var expr="process_a_string(somestring)">

is somemethod is a method returning a string:

<dtml-var expr="process_a_string(somemethod())">

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Beaumont [mailto:cbeaumon@msri.org]
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 3:43 PM
To: zope@zope.org
Subject: [Zope] way to cleanup form input text?


Is there a simple way to clean up text that's input to HTML forms in Zope?
I have a situation where one of my users is copying text from her web 
browser and pasting it into Zope.

I'm sure this is a common problem..

The input text ends up having runs of whitespace characters in it 
that I'd like to prune down to one each..and I think it's also been 
the source of some non-standard, unwanted characters that cause 
problems if they end up getting into our database..

I'm sure someone else has encountered this problem before..what's the 
best way to fix it? The string module doesn't seem to have what I 
want.. (or at least I couldn't find it..)  The worst problems seems 
to be long strings of spaces or tabs that I'd like to turn into 
single spaces..(each)




Thanks!

Chris

cbeaumon@msri.org

_______________________________________________
Zope maillist  -  Zope@zope.org
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope
**   No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )