Generating HTML documents in python

You can use yattag to do this in an elegant way. FYI I'm the author of the library.

from yattag import Doc

doc, tag, text = Doc().tagtext()

with tag('html'):
    with tag('body'):
        with tag('p', id = 'main'):
            text('some text')
        with tag('a', href='/my-url'):
            text('some link')

result = doc.getvalue()

It reads like html, with the added benefit that you don't have to close tags.

I would suggest using one of the many template languages available for python, for example the one built into Django (you don't have to use the rest of Django to use its templating engine) - a google query should give you plenty of other alternative template implementations.

I find that learning a template library helps in so many ways - whenever you need to generate an e-mail, HTML page, text file or similar, you just write a template, load it with your template library, then let the template code create the finished product.

Here's some simple code to get you started:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from django.template import Template, Context
from django.conf import settings
settings.configure() # We have to do this to use django templates standalone - see
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/98135/how-do-i-use-django-templates-without-the-rest-of-django

# Our template. Could just as easily be stored in a separate file
template = """
<html>
<head>
<title>Template {{ title }}</title>
</head>
<body>
Body with {{ mystring }}.
</body>
</html>
"""

t = Template(template)
c = Context({"title": "title from code",
             "mystring":"string from code"})
print t.render(c)

It's even simpler if you have templates on disk - check out the render_to_string function for django 1.7 that can load templates from disk from a predefined list of search paths, fill with data from a dictory and render to a string - all in one function call. (removed from django 1.8 on, see Engine.from_string for comparable action)

If you're building HTML documents than I highly suggest using a template system (like jinja2) as others have suggested. If you're in need of some low level generation of html bits (perhaps as an input to one of your templates), then the xml.etree package is a standard python package and might fit the bill nicely.

import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

html = ET.Element('html')
body = ET.Element('body')
html.append(body)
div = ET.Element('div', attrib={'class': 'foo'})
body.append(div)
span = ET.Element('span', attrib={'class': 'bar'})
div.append(span)
span.text = "Hello World"

if sys.version_info < (3, 0, 0):
    # python 2
    ET.ElementTree(html).write(sys.stdout, encoding='utf-8',
                               method='html')
else:
    # python 3
    ET.ElementTree(html).write(sys.stdout, encoding='unicode',
                               method='html')

Prints the following:

<html><body><div class="foo"><span class="bar">Hello World</span></div></body></html>

Generating HTML documents in python

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