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?
Dominate is a Python library for creating HTML documents and fragments directly in code without using templating. You could create a simple image gallery with something like this:
import glob
from dominate import document
from dominate.tags import *
photos = glob.glob('photos/*.jpg')
with document(title='Photos') as doc:
h1('Photos')
for path in photos:
div(img(src=path), _class='photo')
with open('gallery.html', 'w') as f:
f.write(doc.render())
Output:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Photos</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Photos</h1>
<div class="photo">
<img src="photos/IMG_5115.jpg">
</div>
<div class="photo">
<img src="photos/IMG_5117.jpg">
</div>
</body>
</html>
Disclaimer: I am the author of dominate
print-ing HTML. The Dominate library just clicks for me. To me Dominate feels very lisp-y in the sense that you always hear that Lisp is great for using the language itself as a Domain Specific Language. Well, it turns out Python is really good for this as well!
I think, if i understand you correctly, you can see here, "Templating in Python".
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.
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;-).
Just write a file that contains html
a = '''
<html>
<head>
<h1> hello </h1>
</head>
</html>
'''
f = open("myhtmlfile.html", "a")
f.write(a)
An alternative to Dominate is Chope, which also supports CSS.
Here's an example:
from chope import *
from chope.css import *
page = html[
head[
style[
Css[
'body': dict(
background_color='linen',
font_size=pt/12
),
'.inner-div': dict(
color='maroon',
margin_left=px/40
)
]
]
],
body[
h1['Title'],
div(class_='outer-div')[
div(class_='inner-div')[
'Some content.'
]
]
]
]
Which will give you
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {
background-color: linen;
font-size: 12pt;
}
.inner-div {
color: maroon;
margin-left: 40px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>
Title
</h1>
<div class="outer-div">
<div class="inner-div">
Some content.
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Disclaimer: I am the creator of Chope
You can also use the standard library:
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
resHTML = ET.Element('html',attrib={'lang':'en'})
body = ET.SubElement(resHTML,'body')
p1 = ET.SubElement(body,'p')
span1 = ET.SubElement(p1,'span', attrib={'id': 'anIDA'})
span1.text = "mytext"
with open("HTMLtest.html","wb") as o:
o.write(b"<!DOCTYPE html>\n")
o.write(ET.tostring(resHTML))
# cleanest way using Beautiful Soup
import bs4
with open("HTMLtest.html","w") as o:
o.write(bs4.BeautifulSoup(ET.tostring(resHTML), "html").prettify())
