A web coding tip for a change: After a long coding hiatus, I decided to try my hand at recoding my web-based budget software with AngularJS on the client side and Bottle.py handling the backend. Superb and compact combination, by the way!

Bottle.py comes with a great minimalist templating engine called SimpleTemplate, which uses {{ var }} syntax for inline variables. This does not mix well with client side AngularJS which uses the exactly same delimiters. There is an easy way to change Angular’s syntax with $interpolateProvider, but guess what? Many AngularJS additions, like the datagrid component ui-grid (previously ng-grid) don’t respect this setting, and just plain break with custom delimiters. Not nice

Changing Bottle.py template tags

So, what if you want to change SimpleTemplate syntax? Turns out there is very little documentation for it, even if it’s a single line change. Just locate this line in bottle.py:

default_syntax = '<% %> % {{ }}'

…and change it to:

default_syntax = '<% %> % [[ ]]'

And that’s it! Actually, not quite, because bottle default error page template is hardcoded for curly braces. So locate ERROR_PAGE_TEMPLATE in the same file, and change every {{var}} to [[var]].

There is elegant code in bottle.py that seems to enable replacing the default syntax, but unfortunately the only tip for using it seemed somewhat complicated. So I opted for this simple hack. I’ll sure regret it when I next time update my bottle.py, but, well, that’s not in this month, right?