markup.py

Posted on September 18, 2008

Glenn and I discovered markup.py today. It's a lightweight, simple Python module for generating HTML and XML. Tags are generated using Python objects, with calls to methods on those objects dynamically creating child tags (using __getattr__ trickery). A useful feature is that repeated tags of the same type can be blatted out by passing sequences of values.

The module provides a natural way to create correct HTML/XML from Python and suited our needs perfectly. My only complaint is that the output isn't indented so it can be harder to read than it needs to be. It would probably be straightforward to add such an option. Also, it would be nice if the output could be streamed to a file-like object. Currently it builds the output in memory which could be a potential problem for large pages.

markup.py is worth adding to your toolbox if you ever have to generate bits of XML from Python. For simple jobs, it beats using a complex XML library and is less error prone than plain old string interpolation.