Creating Our Flask Application in Python

Flask is a lightweight web application framework written in Python. It is easy to learn and simple to use, making it a great choice for building web applications. In this article, we will create a character counter web application using Flask.

Setting Up Our Environment

Before we can start building our application, we need to make sure that we have Flask installed on our system. We can do this using the following command:

pip install flask

Creating the Webapp

Once Flask is installed, we can start creating our web application. First, we need to create a new directory for our project and navigate into it. Then, we can create a new file called app.py and begin writing our Flask application.

from flask import Flask, request, render_template

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return render_template('index.html')

@app.route('/count', methods=['POST'])
def count():
    text = request.form['text']
    character_count = len(text)
    return render_template('count.html', character_count=character_count)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    app.run(debug=True)
    

Creating the HTML Templates

In our Flask application, we will use two HTML templates: index.html and count.html. The index.html file will contain a form for the user to input text, and the count.html file will display the character count. Below are the contents of these two files:

    


    
Character Counter
    
        
        

        
    







    


    
Character Count
    
The number of characters in the text is: {{ character_count }}


    

Running the Application

With our Flask application and HTML templates in place, we can now run our web application. We can do this by running the following command in our terminal:

python app.py

Conclusion

In this article, we have created a simple character counter web application using Flask and Python. We have seen how easy it is to build web applications with Flask, and we have used HTML templates to create the user interface. With this foundation, we can continue to expand and improve our web application by adding more features and functionality.