Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trialBrendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 PointsWhy is the Django template syntax so different from Python?
For example:
{{ course.created_at|date:"m/d/y" }}
- filter gets chained on with a pipe rather than dot
- arguments to the filter go after a colon rather than inside parentheses
Are there functional or historical reasons for this? Just curious.
2 Answers
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 PointsOne reason for a different Django filter syntax is to differentiate the functionality to access attributes and bound methods to the Python object in the variable and the Django template functionality. The Django filters run on the output of the Python object methods and attributes.
In the docs for writing custom filters, besides the filtered object, the filter take a single argument.
The colon (:) indicates whether the filter takes an argument. The reasons behind it aren't clear, but to me, by not using parens it makes it clearly not a regular python function.
jason chan
31,009 PointsThat's how frameworks work. It's the same for javascript - angularjs, php - laravel has similar syntax
{{ $var }}
Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 PointsDo they also use the pipe and the colon the same way?