Opened 12 years ago

Closed 12 years ago

#18742 closed Bug (duplicate)

Template tag length returns invalid value

Reported by: lukaslipka@… Owned by: nobody
Component: Template system Version: 1.4
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Triage Stage: Design decision needed
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description

The length template tag shows some weird behavior for undefined values.

A condition such as evaluates true, when blabla is undefined:

{% if blabla|length > 5 %}
  {{ blabla|length }}
{% endif %}

Even though it evaluates true, the output of {{ blabla|length }} is 0.

Change History (3)

comment:1 by Karen Tracey, 12 years ago

Not sure what to do about this one. During the evaluation of the filter expression condition in the if tag, blabla is evaluated as a TemplateLiteral, which resolves the value in the context specifying ignore_failures=True:

https://github.com/django/django/blob/stable/1.4.x/django/template/defaulttags.py#L814

With ignore_failures True, the value resolves to None instead of the empty string it would resolve to if ignore_failures was False. None as the value for the length filter causes length to return an empty string:

https://github.com/django/django/blob/stable/1.4.x/django/template/defaultfilters.py#L540

Subsequently when evaluating {{ blabla|length }}, blabla is resolved with ignore_failures False, so it resolve to the empty string. And the length of the empty string is 0.

Changing TemplateLiteral eval to not specify ignore_failures=True breaks a bunch of if tag template tests. Changing the length filter to return 0 instead of the empty string for invalid inputs breaks a bunch of length filter tests. Whether either of these changes would break real code I'm not sure (length returning an empty string, in particular, seems an odd thing to me...though I can see how that may actually be used to display no output at all for non-existent data rather than 0...so I suspect changing that would in fact break things in some real code). Either of them does make the template fragment in the description behave sanely, but neither is backwards-compatible.

comment:2 by Stephen Burrows, 12 years ago

Triage Stage: UnreviewedDesign decision needed

It sounds like this is maybe DDN.

My two cents: Changing |length to return 0 instead of an empty string makes the most sense to me. It may break some templates, true, but it wouldn't be that hard to fix.

Version 0, edited 12 years ago by Stephen Burrows (next)

comment:3 by Baptiste Mispelon, 12 years ago

Resolution: duplicate
Status: newclosed

This is a duplicate of #18400.

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