Creating HTML in python

user_106534 0
Viewed 92639

I am looking for a way to create html files dynamically in python. I am writing a gallery script, which iterates over directories, collecting file meta data. I intended to then use this data to automatically create a picture gallery, based on html. Something very simple, just a table of pictures.

I really don't think writing to a file manually is the best method, and the code may be very long. So is there a better way to do this, possibly html specific?

html python
5 Answers
user_1315270
Ignacio_Vazquez-Abrams_208620

Python is a batteries included language. So why not use xml.dom.minidom?

from typing import List
from xml.dom.minidom import getDOMImplementation, Document


def getDOM() -> Document:
    impl = getDOMImplementation()
    dt = impl.createDocumentType(
        "html",
        "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN",
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd",
    )
    return impl.createDocument("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "html", dt)


def ul(items: List[str]) -> str:
    dom = getDOM()
    html = dom.documentElement
    ul = dom.createElement("ul")
    for item in items:
        li = dom.createElement("li")
        li.appendChild(dom.createTextNode(item))
        ul.appendChild(li)
    html.appendChild(ul)
    return dom.toxml()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(ul(["first item", "second item", "third item"]))

outputs:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html  PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN'  'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>
<html>
    <ul>
        <li>first item</li>
        <li>second item</li>
        <li>third item</li>
    </ul>
</html>

The interface does not look like pythonic, but if you have been a fronted developer and used JavaScript DOM manipulation, it matches your mind better and yes it frees you from adding a needless dependency.

user_10976180

Templating, as suggested in other answers, is probably the best answer (I wrote an early, quirky templating module called yaptu, but modern mature ones as suggested in other answers will probably make you happier;-).

However, though it's been a long time since I last used it, I fondly recall the Quixote approach, which is roughly a "reverse templating" (embedding HTML generation within Python, rather than viceversa as normal templating does). Maybe you should take a look and see if you like it better;-).

user_958100
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