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What's the most Pythonic XHTML/HTML parser/generator/template module that supports DOM like access?

Answer 1

+1 A:

have you looked at pyWeb ?

Perpetualcoder 2009-11-16 23:29:22

Very briefly, I will look more

Luke Stanley 2009-11-17 00:34:29

Answer 2

+1 A:

Amara Bindery provides the most Pythonic XML API I've seen. See the quick reference, manual and faq

quark 2009-11-16 23:33:52

Could be a good basis, thanks Quark! *investigating*

Luke Stanley 2009-11-17 00:44:25

You know this is looking the most promising now I've had more time to compare it. It's inserting <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> at the start of my HTML though. I'm looking for a fix right now.

Luke Stanley 2009-11-18 03:04:39

I compiled the latest version, then this worked:>>> from amara import *>>> doc = parse('<html><head><title>Hi</title></head><body></body></html>')>>> print doc.xml_encode(("html-indent"))<html> <head> <title>Hi</title> </head> <body></body></html>more examples and wrapping action later

Luke Stanley 2009-11-18 17:03:47

If you end up using it further I'd be interested too to hear what you like and what you don't. Perhaps update your question with what you end up doing.

quark 2009-11-18 19:07:21

Answer 3

+2 A:

The first part can for the most part be done by ElementTree, but it takes a few more steps:

>>> import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
>>> html = ET.XML('<html><head><title>Hi</title></head><body></body></html>')
>>> html.head = html.find('head')
>>> html.head.append(ET.XML('<link type="text/css" href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" />'))
>>> html.head.title = html.head.find('title')
>>> html.head.title.text
'Hi'

The second part can be completed by creating Element objects, but you'd need to do some of your own work to make it happen the way you really want:

>>> html.body = html.find('body')
>>> my_h1 = ET.Element('h1', {'class': 'roflol'})
>>> my_h1.text = 'BIG TITLE!12'
>>> html.body.append(my_h1)
>>> html.body.SOURCE = ET.tostring(html.body)
>>> html.body.SOURCE
'<body><h1 class="roflol">BIG TITLE!12</h1></body>'

You could create a stylesheet function of your own:

>>> def stylesheet(href='', type='text/css', rel='stylesheet', **kwargs):
...     elem = ET.Element('link', href=href, type=type, rel=rel) 
...     return elem
... 
>>> html.head.append(stylesheet(href="main.css"))

And the whole document:

>>> ET.tostring(html)
<html><head><title>Hi</title><link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /></head><body><h1 class="roflol">BIG TITLE!12</h1></body></html>

But, I think if you're going to end up writing your own thing, this is a good place to start. ElementTree is very powerful.

Edit: I realize that this is probably not exactly what you're looking for. I just wanted to provide something as an available alternative and to also prove that it could actually be done without too much work.

jathanism 2009-11-17 00:13:10

Very many thanks Synack. I will try and see if I can bash this into what I specified with some wrappers. Do you want to be kept up to date? I will post a followup here.

Luke Stanley 2009-11-17 00:29:25

Absolutely, I would love to see how it turns out. I think this sounds fun.

jathanism 2009-11-17 02:37:34

I'm actually using it as part of a MVC. I want to use it as the intermediary model. I have nothing against using templating languages as well though. If combined with PyJS (Pyjamas), it could be quite a powerful beast. I want to use a little JQuery too though.

Luke Stanley 2009-11-17 17:55:24

If that's the case, have you considered Django? It has its own template system which is very easy to use, powerful, and extensible.

jathanism 2009-11-17 18:57:36

I considered Django, TurboGears, Pylons and few others.It's too complex, I want something people can pick up instantly.I'm building a semantic desktop platform with parts of web technology but I don't want me, or other developers to have to spend time to focus on random details that aren't important like using html.find('head') instead of html.head - there are other things they need to think about instead.We have Python! I'd be happy to forget that HTML and Javascript is being used under the hood. It's just one layer of the model.I'm building a lifemap app: http://thoughttrail.com/intro/

Luke Stanley 2009-11-18 03:34:37

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What's the most Pythonic XHTML/HTML parser/generator/template module that supports DOM like access?

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