"Variables and attributes may not begin with underscores" error

[Raffaele Salmaso]

Hi,

anyone knows the rationale for forbidding variables and attributes with an initial underscore in django templates?

This limitation is here from day 0 

https://github.com/django/django/blob/ed114e15106192b22ebb78ef5bf5bce72b419d13/django/core/template.py#L261

and docs doesn't mention it (or simply I can't google it)

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/language/#variables

I've removed this check and it seem fine for the empirical tests

https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/template/base.py#L786

If there is no objection would be ok to remove this limitation?

Thaks

--

| Raffaele Salmaso
| https://salmaso.org
| https://bitbucket.org/rsalmaso
| https://github.com/rsalmaso

[Gregory Kaleka]

The docs do mention it on the more complete template api page, though there isn't an explanation as to the reason. I would say it should at least be added to the template docs you link to.

[Tim Graham]

I think the reason is that underscore-prefixed attributes are generally considered to be private. Accessing them in templates doesn't seem like good practice.