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Reputation: 19372

Generate HTML/XML in Python?

I am using Python to programmatically generate HTML. The HTML I want to generate is this:

<p>Hello <b>world</b> how are you?</p>

However, I do not know how to add the hello before the <b> tag and the string how are you? after the bold tag.

My code looks like this:

from xml.etree import ElementTree

p = ElementTree.Element('p')

b = ElementTree.Element('b')
b.text = 'world'

p.append(b)

Where would I add hello and how are you? The paragraph element only has one p.text field, and there does not seem to be a way to intersperse text and other HTML tags when building the document.

How can I programmatically generate an HTML document with both tags and text mixed together?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2089

Answers (2)

Zach Young
Zach Young

Reputation: 11223

Regardless of how lenient/permissive the parsing of HTML by the rendering engine is, OP is asking how to responsibly build structured text.

Here's how to do build structure with ElementTree's TreeBuilder class, it's very straight-forward:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

builder = ET.TreeBuilder()
builder.start('p', {})
builder.data('Hello ')
builder.start('b', {})
builder.data('world')
builder.end('b')
builder.data(' how are you?')
builder.end('p')

root = builder.close()  # close to "finalize the tree" and return an Element

ET.dump(root)  # print the Element

For what it’s worth, I see

<p>Hello <b>world…

as being very analogous to

<para>Hello <emphasis>world…

in Docbook XML.

Upvotes: 3

Tim Roberts
Tim Roberts

Reputation: 54743

You CAN do this, but you'd need to put the pieces of text into <span> tags. In my opinion, this is just a bad idea. HTML is not XML. There are much better tools.

import sys
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET

html = ET.Element('html')
body = ET.Element('body')
html.append(body)
para = ET.Element('p')
b1 = ET.Element('span')
b1.text = "Hello"
b2 = ET.Element('b')
b2.text = "world,"
b3 = ET.Element('span')
b3.text = "how are you?"
para.append(b1)
para.append(b2)
para.append(b3)
html.append(para)

ET.ElementTree(html).write(sys.stdout, encoding='unicode', method='html')

Upvotes: -1

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