Generating HTML from python

[Kent Johnson]

Philippe C. Martin wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I wish to use an easy way to generate reports from wxPython and feel
> wxHtmlEasyPrinting could be a good solution.
> 
> I now need to generate the HTML wxHtmlEasyPrinting can print: I need to have
> a title followed by lines of text that do not look too ugly. If possible I
> would like to use an existing module.
> 
> Q1) Is there such a module ?
> Q2) Is my approach fairly good ?

There are many ways to do this. The simplest is just to mix HTML and Python code in your own module, as Thomas has shown. This is quick and easy to do but IMO it doesn't scale well to large pages or large number of pages; the mix of raw HTML and Python code is hard to work with.

This page lists many alternatives: http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming

The interesting categories from that page:
"Templating Engines" provide a way to describe the HTML that is more-or-less independent of the code. They vary widely in style. If you want a lot of control over the generated HTML you probably want to use one of these.

"HTML Shorthand Processors" provide an alternate way to specify markup and a program to convert the markup to HTML. reStructuredText is in this category. To use one of these you would still have to generate the alternate markup in your program similar to the simple HTML method.

"HTML Generation class libraries" are libraries that make it easier to create HTML programmatically. This can be a good approach if the HTML is simple. I guess you can add many Python XML libraries to this category as well; for example you could use ElementTree to generate a model of an XHTML page and output it.

Choosing within the categories depends a lot on personal preference, you just have to find a package whose style you like and whose features fit your needs.

HTH,
Kent