HTMLΒΆ

Quoting does not need to be a simple matter of string concatenation. It can involve sophisticated on-the-fly decisions based on content and context.

For example, there is an extended quoting mode designed for XML and HTML construction. Instead of prefix and suffix strings, XMLQuoter and HTMLQuoter classes build valid HTML out of tag names and “CSS selector” style specifications (similar to those used by jQuery). This is a considerable help in Python, which defines and/or reserves some of the attribute names most used in HTML (e.g. class and id). Using the CSS selector style neatly gets around this annoyance–and is more compact and more consistent with modern web development idioms to boot.:

from quoter import *

print html.p('this is great!', {'class':'emphatic'})
print html.p('this is great!', '.spastic')
print html.p('First para!', '#first')

Yields:

<p class=’emphatic’>this is great!</p> <p class=’spastic’>this is great!</p> <p id=’first’>First para!</p>

Note that the order in which attributes appear is not guaranteed. They’re stored in dict objects, which have different orderings on different versions of Python. This generally isn’t a problem, in that ordering isn’t significant in HTML. It can, however, make string-based testing more annoying.

The following CSS selectors are understood:

CSS Spec Result X/HTML
tag <tag>
#ident id=”ident”
.classname class=”classname”
[key=value] key=”value”

Note that with the exception of tagnames and ids, multiple setters are possible in the same CSS spec. So p#one.main.special[lang=en] defines <p id='one' class='main special' lang='en'>.

HTML quoting also understands that some elements are “void” or “self-closing,” meaning they do not need closing tags (and in some cases, not even content). So for example:

>>> print html.br()
<br>

>>> print html.img('.big', src='afile')
<img class='big' src='afile'>

The html object for HTMLQuoter (or corresponding xml for XMLQuoter) is a convenient front-end that can be immediately used to provide simple markup language construction. (It’s actually a StyleSet that knows how to create new styles on-the-fly.)

You can also access the underlying classes directly, and/or define your own customized quoters. Your own quoters can be called as a function would be. Or, if you give them a name, they can be called through the html front-end, just like the pre-defined tags. For instance:

para_e = html._define('para_e', 'p.emphatic')
print para_e('this is great!')
print html.para_e('this is great?', '.question')
print html.img('.large', src='somefile')
print html.br()

Yields:

<p class='emphatic'>this is great!</p>
<p class='question emphatic'>this is great?</p>
<img class='large' src='somefile'>
<br>

HTMLQuoter quotes attributes by default with single quotes. If you prefer double quotes, you may set them when the element is defined:

div = HTMLQuoter('div', attquote=double)

Note

Some output may show HTML and XML elements in a different order that described in the documentation. This is because Python dict data structures in which keyword arguments are stored are expressly unordered. In practice, their order is implementation dependent, and varies based on whether you’re running on Python 2, Python 3, or PyPy. quoter always produces correct output, but the ordering may be subtly different from the order suggested by the source code. If this variance bothers you, please join me in lobbying for dictionary ordering (OrderedDict) to become the standard behavior for kwargs in future versions of Python.