Slice a string and store it as list in django python inside HTML file

Question

I am sending a variable names = "['name1', 'name2', 'name3']" as String to an HTML file from my method in views.py along with other information.

When I tried to split the string names with names.split() as:

{% for name in names.split(',') %}
 {{ name }}
{% endfor %}

then I am facing this TemplateSyntaxError

Could not parse the remainder: '(',')' from 'share.share_per_person.split(',')'

When I tried to print the string as

{{ names }}

then output is ['name1', 'name2', 'name3']

I want to display individual names on screen.

Can you explain why you are sending this string that looks like a list in the first place? Where did you get it from? And why can't you do this conversion in the view? — Daniel Roseman, Apr 07 '18 at 20:56
Why don't you render `template` with `render()` method with `context` , so you can easily loop through it ? — Cuong Vu, Apr 07 '18 at 20:57
@DanielRoseman I am getting this data from local Database in which I used a column "names" to store list of names as a string in database. — Bharanidhar Reddy, Apr 07 '18 at 21:35
@VuHuuCuong I used render from my view to call html file as return render(request, 'app/main.html', {'names': names}). Is this what you asked? I dont have knowledge on what a context is. — Bharanidhar Reddy, Apr 07 '18 at 21:43
Convert to a proper list in the view. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/1894293/4872140 for how. — AMG, Apr 08 '18 at 02:59

AMG · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-08T03:13:09.363

use something like the following in your view to convert that string from your database to a proper list using abstract syntax tree method literal_eval.

from django.shortcuts import render
import ast

def sample_request(request):

    names = "['name1', 'name2', 'name3']"

    # abstract syntax tree
    # https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/ast.html
    names_list = ast.literal_eval(names)

    context = {'names': names_list,
               'some_other_var': 'value',
               }
    return render(request, 'dashboard/index.html', context)

then in your template you should be able to do the normal {% for name in names %} {{ name }}<br /> {% endfor %} credit to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1894293/4872140

Slice a string and store it as list in django python inside HTML file

1 Answers1