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Dominate is a Python library for creating and manipulating HTML documents using an elegant DOM API. It allows you to write HTML pages in pure Python very concisely, which eliminate the need to learn another template language, and to take advantage of the more powerful features of Python.

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Dominate

Dominate is a Python library for creating and manipulating HTML documents using an elegant DOM API. It allows you to write HTML pages in pure Python very concisely, which eliminates the need to learn another template language, and lets you take advantage of the more powerful features of Python.

Python:

import dominate
from dominate.tags import *

doc = dominate.document(title='Dominate your HTML')

with doc.head:
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='style.css')
    script(type='text/javascript', src='script.js')

with doc:
    with div(id='header').add(ol()):
        for i in ['home', 'about', 'contact']:
            li(a(i.title(), href='/%s.html' % i))

    with div():
        attr(cls='body')
        p('Lorem ipsum..')

print doc

Output:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Dominate your HTML</title>
    <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet">
    <script src="script.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="header">
      <ol>
        <li>
          <a href="/home.html">Home</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="/about.html">About</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="/contact.html">Contact</a>
        </li>
      </ol>
    </div>
    <div class="body">
      <p>Lorem ipsum..</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Compatibility

Dominate is compatible with both Python 2.7 and Python 3.3. There are known issues with Python 3.2 and below.

Build Status Coverage Status

Installation

The recommended way to install dominate is with pip:

sudo pip install dominate

PyPI version

Developed By

Git repository located at github.com/Knio/dominate

Examples

All examples assume you have imported the appropriate tags or entire tag set:

from dominate.tags import *

Hello, World!

The most basic feature of dominate exposes a class for each HTML element, where the constructor accepts child elements, text, or keyword attributes. dominate nodes return their HTML representation from the __str__, __unicode__, and render() methods.

print html(body(h1('Hello, World!')))
<html>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

Attributes

Dominate can also use keyword arguments to append attributes onto your tags. Most of the attributes are a direct copy from the HTML spec with a few variations.

For attributes class and for which conflict with Python's reserved keywords, you can use the following aliases:

class for
_class _for
cls fr
className htmlFor
class_name html_for
test = label(cls='classname anothername', fr='someinput')
print test
<label class="classname anothername" for="someinput"></label>

Use data_* for custom HTML5 data attributes.

test = div(data_employee='101011')
print test
<div data-employee="101011"></div>

You can also modify the attributes of tags through a dictionary-like interface:

header = div()
header['id'] = 'header'
print header
<div id="header"></div>

Complex Structures

Through the use of the += operator and the .add() method you can easily create more advanced structures.

Create a simple list:

list = ul()
for item in range(4):
    list += li('Item #', item)
print list
<ul>
    <li>Item #0</li>
    <li>Item #1</li>
    <li>Item #2</li>
    <li>Item #3</li>
</ul>

dominate supports iterables to help streamline your code:

print ul(li(a(name, href=link), __inline=True) for name, link in menu_items)
<ul>
    <li><a href="/home/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/about/">About</a></li>
    <li><a href="/downloads/">Downloads</a></li>
    <li><a href="/links/">Links</a></li>
</ul>

A simple document tree:

_html = html()
_body = _html.add(body())
header  = _body.add(div(id='header'))
content = _body.add(div(id='content'))
footer  = _body.add(div(id='footer'))
print _html
<html>
    <body>
        <div id="header"></div>
        <div id="content"></div>
        <div id="footer"></div>
    </body>
</html>

For clean code, the .add() method returns children in tuples. The above example can be cleaned up and expanded like this:

_html = html()
_head, _body = _html.add(head(title('Simple Document Tree')), body())
names = ['header', 'content', 'footer']
header, content, footer = _body.add(div(id=name) for name in names)
print _html
<html>
    <head>
       <title>Simple Document Tree</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="header"></div>
        <div id="content"></div>
        <div id="footer"></div>
    </body>
</html>

You can modify the attributes of tags through a dictionary-like interface:

header = div()
header['id'] = 'header'
print header
<div id="header"></div>

Or the children of a tag though an array-line interface:

header = div('Test')
header[0] = 'Hello World'
print header
<div>Hello World</div>

Comments can be created using objects too!

print comment('BEGIN HEADER')
<!--BEGIN HEADER-->
print comment(p('Upgrade to newer IE!'), condition='lt IE9')
<!--[if lt IE9]>
  <p>Upgrade to newer IE!</p>
<![endif]-->

Context Managers

You can also add child elements using Python's with statement:

h = ul()
with h:
    li('One')
    li('Two')
    li('Three')

print h
<ul>
    <li>One</li>
    <li>Two</li>
    <li>Three</li>
</ul>

You can use this along with the other mechanisms of adding children elements, including nesting with statements, and it works as expected:

h = html()
with h.add(body()).add(div(id='content')):
    h1('Hello World!')
    p('Lorem ipsum ...')
    with table().add(tbody()):
        l = tr()
        l += td('One')
        l.add(td('Two'))
        with l:
            td('Three')

print h
<html>
    <body>
        <div id="content">
            <h1>Hello World!</h1>
            <p>Lorem ipsum ...</p>
            <table>
                <tbody>
                    <tr>
                        <td>One</td>
                        <td>Two</td>
                        <td>Three</td>
                    </tr>
                </tbody>
            </table>
        </div>
    </body>
</html>

When the context is closed, any nodes that were not already added to something get added to the current context.

Attributes can be added to the current context with the attr function:

d = div()
with d:
    attr(id='header')

 print d
<div id="header"></div>

Decorators

Dominate is great for creating reusable widgets for parts of your page. Consider this example:

def greeting(name):
    with div() as d:
        p('Hello, %s' % name)
    return d

print greeting('Bob')
<div>
    <p>Hello, Bob</p>
</div>

You can see the following pattern being repeated here:

def widget(parameters):
    with tag() as t:
        ...
    return t

This boilerplate can be avoided by using tags (objects and instances) as decorators

@div
def greeting(name):
    p('Hello %s' % name)
print greeting('Bob')
<div>
    <p>Hello Bob</p>
</div>

The decorated function will return a new instance of the tag used to decorate it, and execute in a with context which will collect all the nodes created inside it.

You can also use instances of tags as decorators, if you need to add attributes or other data to the root node of the widget. Each call to the decorated function will return a copy of the node used to decorate it.

@div(h2('Welcome'), cls='greeting')
def greeting(name):
    p('Hello %s' % name)

print greeting('Bob')
<div class="greeting">
    <h2>Welcome</h2>
    <p>Hello Bob</p>
</div>

Creating Documents

Since creating the common structure of an HTML document everytime would be excessively tedious dominate provides a class to create and manage them for you: document.

When you create a new document, the basic HTML tag structure is created for you.

d = document()
print d
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
       <title>Dominate</title>
    </head>
    <body></body>
</html>

The document class accepts title, doctype, and request keyword arguments. The default values for these arguments are Dominate, <!DOCTYPE html>, and None respectively.

The document class also provides helpers to allow you to access the html, head, and body nodes directly.

d = document()
>>> d.html
<dominate.tags.html: 0 attributes, 2 children>
>>> d.head
<dominate.tags.head: 0 attributes, 0 children>
>>> d.body
<dominate.tags.body: 0 attributes, 0 children>

You should notice that here the head tag contains zero children. This is because the default title tag is only added when the document is rendered and the head element does not explicitly contain one.

The document class also provides helpers to allow you to directly add nodes to the body tag.

d = document()
d += h1('Hello, World!')
d += p('This is a paragraph.')
print d
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
       <title>Dominate</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
        <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
    </body>
</html>

About

Dominate is a Python library for creating and manipulating HTML documents using an elegant DOM API. It allows you to write HTML pages in pure Python very concisely, which eliminate the need to learn another template language, and to take advantage of the more powerful features of Python.

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