At my day job, I’m a Linux System Administrator. This roughly translates to “Everything System Administrator” as I work in a lot of other capacities as well. One of my duties is maintaining an internal web portal that runs on a RHEL 6 system. A good portion of our portal runs on Python and Perl CGI scripts. I wanted to dynamically update part of a page and I needed to make an Ajax call to a Python script instead of a normal PHP or ASP (etc). I ran into a problem with a not so obvious solution compared to how people make calls to PHP backends.
The script below outlines how to get just the desired <body> portion of the data returned by the Python backend, and trims leading and trailing spaces that might interfere with the operation of your program. This script is for creating a toggle button ( on / off ) which calls a function in the Python backend. Because our backend is a CGI script written in python, python has to print header information, which would be returned to our Ajax script above if we don’t select “document.body” for the context.
FYI, I am using jquery 1.10.1 if you can’t already tell 
$(document).ready(function(){
function setoff(myid) {
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: "/cgi-bin/backend.py",
data: {mymode: "setoff", myitem: myid},
dataType: 'html',
context: document.body,
global: false,
async:false,
success: function(data) {
mylist = $(data).text().trim();
return mylist;
}
});
}
function seton(myid) {
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
url: "/cgi-bin/backend.py",
data: {mymode: "seton", myitem: myid},
dataType: 'html',
context: document.body,
global: false,
async:false,
success: function(data) {
mylist = $(data).text().trim();
return mylist;
}
});
}
$(document).on('click', '.istoggled', function() {
setoff(this.id);
$(this).toggleClass("istoggled nottoggled");
});
$(document).on('click', '.nottoggled', function() {
seton(this.id);
$(this).toggleClass("istoggled nottoggled");
});
});
Here’s a quick example of a Python backend script.
#!/usr/bin/python
import cgi
print """Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n\n
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>"""
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
mymode = form.getvalue("mymode", "error")
myitem = form.getvalue("myitem", "error")
def doseton(myitem):
### Code here for backend operation
print myitem
def dosetoff(myitem):
### Code here for backend operation
print myitem
if myitem != "error":
if mymode == "seton":
doseton(myitem)
elif mymode == "setoff":
dosetoff(myitem)
else:
print "error"
else:
print "error"
print """</html>"""
Obviously, this file is abbreviated because chances are what I’m doing on the back end isn’t the same as what you’ll want to do