[Zope] Typecasting in DTML (or is this Python?)

[Dylan Reinhardt]

On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 02:17, Julian Clark wrote:
> I'm only familiar with typecasting from my experience in Java

Ah, right.  To me, typecasting is something you deal with in C. 
Anyway...

>  it doesn't look like you're using the % as modulus in this context.

You're right about that.

x % y   

can mean two things, depending on what x and y are.  

If x and y are numeric types, it means "x mod y."  

If, however, x is a string containing special sequences like %s or %d
and y is a variable or tuple that has the same number of elements, the
expression returns y formatted in the way x specifies. 

Two quick examples:

'%s' % x           # x formatted as a string
'%s %s' % (x, y)   # x and y as a string with a space.

There are other fun things you can do with this operator... it's worth
reading up on.  

If you're just getting started with Python, you're in luck... there are
a number of great tutorials available.  See this page for links to a
bunch of them:

http://python.org/doc/Intros.html

HTH,

Dylan