lucumr

Finally Jinja 1.2 is released. It took a long time because this release introduces basically a complete rewrite of the parser and parts of the lexer. With Jinja 1.2 onwards the template engine has its own parser which makes it possible to introduce new syntactical elements and change operator precedence (especially regarding the filter operator which finally binds harder than plus). We added more unittests to check if Jinja stays compatible with the python semantics we had previously and all 153 tests pass :-)

With the new parser we also simplified the syntax a bit, made the “call” a keyword now and added a couple of new features. For example the debugger (with the optional c extension compiled) is now able to rewrite all jinja frames in a traceback so you will never find yourself in the situation where line numbers don’t match the template line numbers.

Another new syntax feature are conditional expressions derived from python2.5 ({{ foo if expr else bar }}). foo.0 is now the same as foo[0] for compatibility with django and tuples are finally tuples and not lists which makes it possible to use string formattings with more than one value. Test functions with one parameter don’t need parentheses so {{ foo is feeling(well) }} can now be written as {{ foo is feeling well }}.

We also added a concatenation operator that converts all arguments into a string automatically to concatenate them. This is very useful if you have some integers and other values you want to join: {{ foo ~ bar ~ baz }}, which is equivalent to {{ foo|string + bar|string + baz|string }}.

Another great new feature (if you are a django user) is the new django support module which makes it a lot easier to integrate Jinja into django. It makes it possible to use django filters in Jinja and load from the same folders.

Aside from that there are couple of improvements and bugfixes. As always you can easy install Jinja directly from pypi or download it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 11:02 pm and tagged as planetubuntu, django, jinja, announcement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.