Python Tinyhtml – Create HTML Documents With Python

By / February 27, 2023
HTML documents

In this article, we will generate and use HTML documents in python by using tinyhtml module of python

How to write raw HTML to file using python?

You can generate HTML documents in Python by manually creating the HTML string and writing it to a file with a .html extension. Here’s a simple example that generates HTML documents with a title, header, and body:

#Storing the entire HTML document in html variable
html = """
<html>
  <head>
    <title>AskPython</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to AskPython</h1>
    <p>This is an article about generating HTML docs using python</p>
  </body>
</html>
"""
#using file management
with open("askpython.html", "w") as f:
    f.write(html)

In the above code, we have used the open() function with “w” mode which writes HTML in the file “askpython.html” this will create a file named “askpython.html” in the same directory with the following content:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>AskPython</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to AskPython</h1>
    <p>This is an article about generating HTML docs using python</p>
  </body>
</html>

To know more about file handling visit the article Python File Handling

The tinyhtml module for HTML documents

tinyhtml is a python library that safely renders and provides a very basic HTML parsing functionality compact HTML5 from Python expressions. In this article we will install and use some useful functions provided by the tinyhtml library : html() , render() , h() and frag()

Installing tinyhtml

We will start by installing tinyhtml in our python environment using pip

pip install tinyhtml

1. Using html() and render() to declare and render basic HTML

html() is used to declare HTML documents. Let’s start with a straightforward example:

from tinyhtml import html
    
html_content = html(lang="en")()  
print(html_content.render())

Explanation:

  • The code creates an HTML html element with the lang attribute set to "en".
  • The () after the html function call indicates that there are no child elements to add to the html element. Therefore output contains just one HTML tag with an attribute
  • The render() method is then called on the html_content variable, which converts the html element to a string of HTML.
  • Finally, the resulting HTML string is printed to the console using the print function.

Output:

<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"></html>

2. Using the h() Function to Generate HTML Code in Python

The function h() is the most useful function, it provides for the rendering of attributes, common components, and void/self-closing elements.

Example:

from tinyhtml import html , h
    
html_content = html(lang="en")(
    h("h1")("Lorem ipsum"),
    h("p")("dolor sit amet."),
    h ("br")
)  
print(html_content.render())

Explanation:

  • The code above creates an HTML document string containing an html element inside which, there are three child elements:
    • An h1 element with the text “Lorem ipsum”.
    • A p element with the text “dolor sit amet.”
    • A br element, which represents a line break in HTML.
  • The h function is used to create the h1 and p elements, and the br element is created directly using the HTML tag.
  • The render method is called on the html_content variable, which converts the html element and its child elements to a string of HTML and the resulting HTML string is printed using the print function.

Output:

<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><h1>Lorem ipsum</h1><p>dolor sit amet.</p><br></html>

The output contains an HTML document string containing an html element with the lang attribute set to "en", an h1 element with the text “Lorem ipsum”, a p element with the text “dolor sit amet.”, and a br element.

3. Using frag() function to generate fragments of HTML code

The function frag() is used to circulate sets of elements.

from tinyhtml import h ,frag

content = frag(
     h("h1")("Lorem ipsum"),
     h("p")("dolor sit amet."),
)
print(content.render())

Explanation:

  • The code creates a fragment of HTML containing an h1 element with the text “Lorem ipsum” and a p element with the text “dolor sit amet.”.
  • The h function is used to create the h1 and p elements.
  • The frag function is then called with two arguments – the h1 and p elements created earlier. This creates a fragment of HTML that contains both elements.
  • The render method is called on the content variable and the resulting string is printed.

Output:

<h1>Lorem ipsum</h1><p>dolor sit amet.</p>

The output is an HTML fragment string containing an h1 element with the text “Lorem ipsum” and a p element with the text “dolor sit amet.”.

4. Adding conditional statements

You can use conditional statements to generate data according to certain external conditions

from tinyhtml import h 

score = input("Input your score(out of 100):")
passing_marks = 33

conditional_html = h("h1")(  
    h("p")("Passed") 
    if int(score) > passing_marks
    else "Failed",
    h("p")("Thank you!")
    )  
print(conditional_html)

Explanation:

  • The code prompts the user to input their score out of 100, with the input value being stored in the score variable. The passing marks are set to 33.
  • The code then creates an HTML document string containing an h1 element and two child p elements.
  • The child element p has the text “Passed” if the score variable, after being converted to an integer, is greater than 33 (passing_marks).
  • If the score variable is less than or equal to the passing_marks , then the text “Failed” is used instead of “Passed”.

Output:

Input your score(out of 100):45
<h1><p>Passed</p><p>Thank you!</p></h1>

5. Adding class to the tags

To initialize a class, we employ the “klass” operator. A trailing underscore is also added to additional labels that may match the names of Python-reserved keywords.

from tinyhtml import h 

html_doc = h("h1")(  
    h("p" , klass = "p1")("Sample text"),
    h("input" , for_ = "firstName")() 
    )  
print(html_doc)

Here we have assigned class “p1” to the paragraph tag and used “klass” instead of “class”. For the input tag, we have used “for_” which is for the label “for” which is a reserved keyword in python. You can see the correct HTML in the given output

Output:

<h1><p class="p1">Sample text</p><input for="firstName"></input></h1>

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve created HTML documents using tinyhtml. We’ve provided a few basic tags that you can alter as necessary. Also, read Pandas to html.

References

https://pypi.org/project/tinyhtml/