templating with xhtml, xpath, and python
#tags xml,web,python

I've been gradually researching interesting ways to go about templating pages for Pimp 4.0 (rewrite in python). I've come to the conclusion that regexp replacement is hackish. Using a big templating toolkit is too much effort for now. However, I've come up with a solution I've yet to test thorougly, but the gist of it is:
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Use an XML DOM parser to get a DOM-ified version of the webpage. Use XPath to find elements I want to modify and do so as necessary. Poof, templating.

A sample template is <a href="http://www.csh.rit.edu/~psionic/misc/layout.html">layout.html</a>
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The following python will parse it and insert "Testing" into the content div.
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<pre>
#!/usr/local/bin/python

import sys
from xml.dom import minidom
from xml import xpath

if __name__ == '__main__':
        foo = minidom.parse("layout.html")

        # Append a text node to the element with 'id="content"'
        div = xpath.Evaluate("//*[@id='content']", foo.documentElement)
        div[0].appendChild(foo.createTextNode("Testing"))
        foo.writexml(sys.stdout)
</pre>

It seems pretty simple. I'm probably going to come up with a simple-ish xml/xpath way of doing templating. We'll see how well it actually works later on, but for now it seems like a pretty simple way of doing templating. Move the complicated parts (complex xpath notions) to a templating class with an "insert text" or somesuch method and poof, simple templating. Even for complex situations where I may need to produce a table it is easy to provide a default node-tree for replicating. The particular DOM implementation I am using provides me a wonderful cloneNode() method with which to do this.

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Ofcourse, if you know of any other simpler ways of doing templating in python (or in general) definitely let me know :)