Django templates - split string to array

Question

I have a model field, which stores a list of URLs (yeah, I know, that\'s wrong way) as url1\\nurl2\\nurl3<...>. I need to split the field into an array in

Answer 1

Django intentionally leaves out many types of templatetags to discourage you from doing too much processing in the template. (Unfortunately, people usually just add these types of templatetags themselves.)

This is a perfect example of something that should be in your model not your template.

class Game(models.Model):
    ...
    def screenshots_as_list(self):
        return self.screenshots.split('\n')

Then, in your template, you just do:

{% for screen in game.screenshots_as_list %}
    {{ screen }}<br>
{% endfor %}

Much more clear and much easier to work with.

Answer 2

Functionality already exists with linkebreaksbr:

{{ value|linebreaksbr }}

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#linebreaksbr

Answer 3

Apart from whether your original solution was the right approach, I guess the original code did not work because the meaning of the \n is not the same in Python code as it is in HTML: In Python code it means the escaped newline character, in HTML it is just the two separate characters \ and n. So passing as input parameter \n from the HTML template to the Python code is equivalent to splitting on the Python string \\n: a literal \ followed by a n.

Answer 4

Hm, I have partly solved this problem. I changed my filter to:

@register.filter(name='split')
def split(value, arg):
    return value.split('\n')

Why it didn't work with the original code?

Answer 5

I wanted to split a list of words to get a word count, and it turns out there is a filter for that:

{{ value|wordcount }}

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/?from=olddocs#wordcount