= Problem =

How do you read environment variables?

= Solution =

Call the `get_environ()` method of the `HTTPRequest` instance:

{{{
accept_types = self.environ.get('HTTP_ACCEPT')
}}}

`accept_types` will be set to a string containing the value, or `None` if there's no such variable.
Like the `get()` method of dictionaries, you can supply a second value to be returned
in case the key isn't found:

{{{
server_port = int(request.get_environ('SERVER_PORT', 80))
}}}

Alternatively you can access the `.environ` attribute of the request object, which is just a dictionary:

{{{
for k,v in request.environ.items():
    '%s: %s<br>\n' % (k,v)
}}}

= Discussion =

Do not use the standard Python `os.environ`.  Its contents may coincidentally be correct if the Quixote 
application is being run using CGI, but they'll be wrong if the application is run with FastCGI, SCGI, or as a 
standalone server.

See http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html for a list of the CGI environment variables.

----
CategoryCookbook