Python in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Generating HTML

Python does not come with tools to generate HTML. If you want an advanced framework for structured HTML generation, I recommend Robin Friedrich’s HTMLGen 2.2 (available at http://starship.python.net/crew/friedrich/HTMLgen/html/main.html), but I do not cover the package in this book. To generate XHTML, you can use the approaches covered in Chapter 24.

Embedding

If your favorite approach is to embed Python code within HTML in the manner made popular by JSP, ASP, and PHP, one possibility is to use the Python Server Pages (PSP) supplied by Webware (mentioned in Webware). Another package, focused particularly on the embedding approach, is Spyce (available at http://spyce.sf.net/). For all but the simplest problems, however, development and maintenance are eased by separating logic and presentation issues through templating, covered in the next section. Both Webware and Spyce optionally support templating in lieu of embedding.

Templating

To generate HTML, the best approach is often templating. With templating, you start with a template, which is a text string (often read from a file, database, etc.) that is valid HTML, but includes markers, also known as placeholders, where dynamically generated text must be inserted. Your program generates the needed text and substitutes it into the template. In the simplest case, you can use markers of the form '%(name)s'. Set the dynamically generated text as the value for key 'name' in some dictionary d. The Python string formatting operator ...