Need help debugging python html generator

Question

The program is supposed to take user input, turn it into html and pass it into the clipboard.

Start the program with welcome_msg()

If you enter 1 in the main menu, it takes you through building an anchor tag. You'll add the link text, the url, then the title. After you enter the title, I get the following errors:

File "<pyshell#23>", line 1, in <module>
  welcome_msg()
File "C:\Python26\html_hax.py", line 24, in welcome_msg
  anchor()
File "C:\Python26\html_hax.py", line 71, in anchor
  copy_to_clipboard(anchor_output)
File "C:\Python26\html_hax.py", line 45, in copy_to_clipboard
  wc.SetClipboardData(win32con.CF_TEXT, msg)
error: (0, 'SetClipboardData', 'No error message is available')

Here's the Code: http://pastie.org/398163

What is causing the errors above?

Answer 1

In your make_link function you construct a link_output, but you don't actually return it as the functions result. Use return to do this:

def make_link(in_link):
  ...
  if title == '':
    link_output = ...
  else:
    link_output = ...
  return link_output

This way you get the value passed to your anchor_output variable here:

anchor_output = make_link(anchor_text)

This was None because the function didn't return any value, and setting the clipboard to None failed. With the function returning a real string it should work as expected.