formencode.htmlgen – Convenient building of ElementTree nodes

Kind of like htmlgen, only much simpler. The only important symbol that is exported is html.

This builds ElementTree nodes, but with some extra useful methods. (Open issue: should it use ElementTree more, and the raw Element stuff less?)

You create tags with attribute access. I.e., the A anchor tag is html.a. The attributes of the HTML tag are done with keyword arguments. The contents of the tag are the non-keyword arguments (concatenated). You can also use the special c keyword, passing a list, tuple, or single tag, and it will make up the contents (this is useful because keywords have to come after all non-keyword arguments, which is non-intuitive). Or you can chain them, adding the keywords with one call, then the body with a second call, like:

>>> str(html.a(href='http://yahoo.com')('<Yahoo>'))
'<a href="http://yahoo.com">&lt;Yahoo&gt;</a>'

Note that strings will be quoted; only tags given explicitly will remain unquoted.

If the value of an attribute is None, then no attribute will be inserted. So:

>>> str(html.a(href='http://www.yahoo.com', name=None,
...              c='Click Here'))
'<a href="http://www.yahoo.com">Click Here</a>'

If the value is None, then the empty string is used. Otherwise str() is called on the value.

html can also be called, and it will produce a special list from its arguments, which adds a __str__ method that does html.str (which handles quoting, flattening these lists recursively, and using ‘’ for None).

html.comment will generate an HTML comment, like html.comment('comment text') – note that it cannot take keyword arguments (because they wouldn’t mean anything).

Examples:

>>> str(html.html(
...    html.head(html.title("Page Title")),
...    html.body(
...    bgcolor='#000066',
...    text='#ffffff',
...    c=[html.h1('Page Title'),
...       html.p('Hello world!')],
...    )))
'<html><head><title>Page Title</title></head><body bgcolor="#000066" text="#ffffff"><h1>Page Title</h1><p>Hello world!</p></body></html>'
>>> str(html.a(href='#top')('return to top'))
'<a href="#top">return to top</a>'

Module Contents

class formencode.htmlgen._HTML
class formencode.htmlgen.Element(tag, attrib)