blockie 1.1.0

A lightweight Python template engine

Blockie Python template engine

Blockie is an extremely lightweight and simple universal Python-based template engine. It can generate various types of text-based content, e.g., standard text, source code, data files or markup language content like HTML, XML or markdown.

Blockie is aimed to be used in template-based projects that do not need templates containing complex custom commands or programming language parsers. Instead, Blockie uses only a few simple but extremely multipurpose principles and clean, logicless templates. If a more advanced template-filling logic is needed, then it is expected to be defined directly within the user-defined Python script, which avoids the need for a custom template language.

The block diagram below illustrates the fairly standard process of generating the content from a template using values defined in the input data:

    +----------+   +------------+
    | template |   | input data |
    +----------+   +------------+
          |              |
          V              V
      +-----------------------+
      | Python filling script |
      |     using blockie     |
      +-----------------------+
                  |
                  V
        +-------------------+
        | generated content |
        +-------------------+

Please read the full documentation here.

Installation

The Blockie package can be installed from the Python Package Index using the following pip console command:

pip install blockie

Alternatively, it is also possible to install the Blockie package from a *.tar.gz source distribution that can be downloaded from the dist directory:

pip install blockie-<version>.tar.gz

Quick start

The following Python script serves as a simple illustration of all basic principles. The template is loaded from the template string and filled using the data dictionary with the FLAG variable in the template defined by the script since the Blockie templates are logicless. At the end the generated content is printed out.

    import blockie


    template = """
                                SHOPPING LIST
      Items                                                         Quantity
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    <ITEMS>
    * <FLAG>IMPORTANT! <^FLAG>MAYBE? </FLAG><ITEM><+>               <QTY><UNIT> kg<^UNIT> l</UNIT>
    </ITEMS>


    Short list: <ITEMS><ITEM><.>, <^.></.></ITEMS>
    """

    important_items = ("potatoes", "rice")
    maybe_items = ("cooking magazine",)

    data = {
        "items": [
            {"item": "apples", "qty": "1", "unit": 0},
            {"item": "potatoes", "qty": "2", "unit": 0},
            {"item": "rice", "qty": "1", "unit": 0},
            {"item": "orange juice", "qty": "1", "unit": 1},
            {"item": "cooking magazine", "qty": None, "unit": None}
        ]
    }

    for item in data["items"]:
        item["flag"] = 0 if item["item"] in important_items else 1 if item["item"] in maybe_items else None

    blk = blockie.Block(template)
    blk.fill(data)
    print(blk.content)

Prints the following generated content:

                            SHOPPING LIST
  Items                                                         Quantity
------------------------------------------------------------------------
* apples                                                        1 kg
* IMPORTANT! potatoes                                           2 kg
* IMPORTANT! rice                                               1 kg
* orange juice                                                  1 l
* MAYBE? cooking magazine


Short list: apples, potatoes, rice, orange juice, cooking magazine