Generating Web Content from Query Results - MySQL - page 623

Discussion
The examples in the preceding sections generate static text, but database content also is
useful for creating hyperlinks. Website URLs or email addresses stored in a table are
easily converted to active links in web pages. You need only properly encode the infor‐
mation and add the appropriate HTML tags.
Suppose that a table named book_vendor contains bookseller and publisher names and
websites:
mysql> SELECT * FROM book_vendor ORDER BY name;
+----------------+------------------------+
| name | website |
+----------------+------------------------+
| Amazon.com | www.amazon.com |
| Barnes & Noble | www.barnesandnoble.com |
| O'Reilly Media | www.oreilly.com |
+----------------+------------------------+
This table readily lends itself to the creation of hyperlinked text. To produce a hyperlink
from a row, add the http:// protocol designator to the website value, use the result as
the href attribute for an <a> anchor tag, and use the name value in the body of the tag
to serve as the link label. Here is the result for the Barnes & Noble row:
<a href= "http://www.barnesandnoble.com" > Barnes &amp; Noble </a>
JSP code to produce an unordered list of hyperlinks from the table contents looks like
this:
<sql:query dataSource= "${conn}" var= "rs" >
SELECT name, website FROM book_vendor ORDER BY name
</sql:query>
<ul>
<c:forEach items= "${rs.rows}" var= "row" >
<li>
<a href= "http://<c:out value=" ${row.website}" /> ">
<c:out value= "${row.name}" /></a>
</li>
</c:forEach>
</ul>
When displayed in a web page, each vendor name in the list becomes an active link that
can be selected to visit the vendor's website. In Python, the equivalent operation looks
like this:
stmt = "SELECT name, website FROM book_vendor ORDER BY name"
cursor = conn . cursor ()
cursor . execute ( stmt )
items = []
for ( name , website ) in cursor :
items . append ( '<a href="http:// %s "> %s </a>'