Question

I have a Python script and a JS on my server. In the python script, I want to set the value of a variable to be the output of one of the functions in my .js file.

Is this possible, and if so how wold one go about doing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As an alternative to what Macha proposes (an Ajax query) you could also create the Javascript file dynamically.

When the page is loaded, the javascript is loaded. In your page is the URL to the javascript in the form of

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" SRC="mycode.js" TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">

The trick is now to let the server not serve a static file “mycode.js” but the output of e.g. mycode.py. Your tag would thus look like

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" SRC="mycode.py" TYPE="TEXT/JAVASCRIPT">

and the python script would look possibly like (simplified):

var_value = "whatever you want the variable to be"

jsfile = open("myscript.js", "rb")
for line in jsfile:
  print  line.replace("$MYVAR$", var_value)

jsfile.close()

In short, you have your current js file, but you’d use it as a template for the python script. You substitute your variable with its value using replace.

It may not be the most elegant solution but it should work, and isn’t all that difficult to understand.

Don’t forget that your server should know how to handle python scripts 🙂