Parsing a list of items - how-to?

[Larry Wapnitsky]

Disclaimer:  I'm new to Web2py (2 days and loving it) and re-learning HTML after many years away from it.

I have a large text field on a form whose input will be a list of items entered by the user, separated by some sort of delimiter (most likely a newline).  Each valid line item will be entered into the database as its own entity.

How do I go about parsing this text box?  Everything I've seen so far talks about fields that come from/go to a database, but  this one doesn't do so directly.

Let me know if I need to clarify.

Thanks,
Larry

[Alan Etkin]

I think that defining a Field in the model as "list: string" give you
that functionality without further configuration (just creating a
common web2py form intance). For using new lines you should use the
TEXTAREA tag (used for "text" type fields), and split the input string
with the Python built-in string manipulation functions at the
controller.

[Anthony]

Maybe something like this:

mylist = request.vars.mytextarea.splitlines()

That assumes a newline is the delimiter. If you use a different delimiter, then use .split(delimiter) instead.

Anthony

[Larry Wapnitsky]

Thanks to both of you.  I'll try these when I get to my office this morning.  Assume I'll be back with either good results or more questions :)