Creating HTML in python

Question

I am looking for a way to create html files dynamically in python. I am writing a gallery script, which iterates over directories, collecting file meta data. I intended to

Answer 1

Python is a batteries included language. So why not use xml.dom.minidom?

from typing import List
from xml.dom.minidom import getDOMImplementation, Document


def getDOM() -> Document:
    impl = getDOMImplementation()
    dt = impl.createDocumentType(
        "html",
        "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN",
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd",
    )
    return impl.createDocument("http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml", "html", dt)


def ul(items: List[str]) -> str:
    dom = getDOM()
    html = dom.documentElement
    ul = dom.createElement("ul")
    for item in items:
        li = dom.createElement("li")
        li.appendChild(dom.createTextNode(item))
        ul.appendChild(li)
    html.appendChild(ul)
    return dom.toxml()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print(ul(["first item", "second item", "third item"]))

outputs:

    

        
first item
        
second item
        
third item
    

The interface does not look like pythonic, but if you have been a fronted developer and used JavaScript DOM manipulation, it matches your mind better and yes it frees you from adding a needless dependency.