Question

I have a function in my Django app that has a dictionary containing several long strings. When that function is called, those strings are formatted and the dictionary returned.

For example:

def my_strings(foo, bar, baz):
    return = {
        'string1': 'a really long string! %s' % foo,
        'string2': 'another long one. %s %s' % (foo, bar),
        'string3': 'yet another! %s %s %s' % (foo, bar, baz),
    }

However, having all these long strings, stored in a Python file is ugly and it seems there should be a cleaner way to do it.

I’d toyed with putting them in a template file and doing some rendering, like so:

mytemplate.txt

{% if string1 %}
a really long string! {{ foo }}
{% endif %}

{% if string2 %}
another long one. {{ foo }} {{ bar }}
{% endif %}

{% if string3 %}
yet another! {{ foo }} {{ bar }} {{ baz }}
{% endif %}

Python

def my_strings(foo, bar, baz):
    arg_dict = {
        'foo': foo,
        'bar': bar,
        'baz': baz,
    }

    my_strings = {}
    string_names = ['string1', 'string2', 'string3']

    for s in string_names:
        arg_dict[s] = True
        my_strings[s] = render_to_string('mytemplate.txt', arg_dict).strip()
        del arg_dict[s]

    return my_strings

But that seems a little too roundabout, and most likely less performant.

Is there a preferred way in Python, or Django specifically, to handle storing and formatting long string assets?

Some extra context: the string assets are either HTML or plaintext. The dictionary is eventually iterated over and all instances of each key in yet another string are replaced with its string value.

Answer 1

I would treat this as something similar to the way many i8n compilation code does it.

Store the long strings in a dictionary in a separate file. Import that dictionary and then format the desired string in your code.