A critique of cgi.escape

[Brian Quinlan]

Jon Ribbens wrote:
> In article <mailman.708.1159287078.10491.python-list at python.org>, Brian Quinlan wrote:
>> Well, there are dozens (hundreds?) of templating systems for Python. 
> 
> I know, I wrote one of them ;-)
> 
>> t = Template("test.html")
>> t['foo'] = 'Brian -> "Hi!"'
>> assert str(t) == '<p>Brian -> "Hi"</p>'
>>
>> So how would you test our template system?
> 
> What I don't get is why you are testing the above code like that at
> all. Surely if the template system somehow became so broken that it
> couldn't even do trivial replacements, you would notice immediately
> as all your web pages would go totally wrong.

If, in the example that I showed, the less-than character was not 
correctly escaped, then it might not manifest itself frequently in a 
typical application because the less-than character is seldom used in 
English prose.

Also, assuming that single case was trivial to test without a test 
harness, how many web pages do I have to look at to be reasonably 
confident that *every* feature works correctly?

Cheers,
Brian