Creating a list on the fly in a Django template

Question

I don\'t know whether it\'s possible, but I\'d like to be able to write something like the following:

{% with var1 var2 var3 as some_list %}
    {{ some_list         


        

Answer 1

I played around a bit and came up with a tag that can accept a variable number of arguments and convert them into a list.

@register.tag('to_list')
def to_list(_parser, token):
    try:
        parts = token.split_contents()
    except ValueError:
        raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, \
          "%r tag requires at least one argument" % token.contents.split()[0]

    return AsListNode(parts[1:])

class AsListNode(template.Node):
    def __init__(self, parts):
        self.parts = map(lambda p: template.Variable(p), parts)

    def render(self, context):
        resolved = []
        for each in self.parts:
            resolved.append(each.resolve(context))
        return resolved

Template:

{% to_list var1 var2 var3 %}

Update

@Will's solution is better. It lets you save the resulting list using another variable so that you can operate on it later.