Produce Excel files from HTML templates.
Project description
Introduction
from htmxl.compose import Workbook
workbook = Workbook()
workbook.add_sheet_from_template(
template="""
<head>{{ title }}</head>
<body>
<div>
Hello down there, {{ name }}!
</div>
<div>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
{% for column_name in column_names %}
<th>{{ column_name }}</th>
{% endfor %}
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
{% for row in rows %}
<tr>
<td>{{ row.a }}</td>
<td>{{ row.b }}</td>
</tr>
{% endfor %}
</tbody>
</table
</div>
</body>
""",
data=dict(
title="Hello World",
name='Bob',
column_names=['A', 'B'],
rows=[{'a': 'a', 'b': 2}, {'a': 'b', 'b': 2}, {'a': 'c', 'b': 3}],
)
)
workbook.compose('hello_world.xlsx')
The Pitch
Essentially, HTM(x)L is an attempt to allow the declaration of Excel files in a (mostly) declarative manner that separates the format that the document should take from the data being added to it.
The "normal" manner of producing Excel files essentially amounts to a series of imperitive statements about what cells to modify to get the excel file you want. For any file of moderate complexity, this leads to there being very little intuition about what the resulting Excel file will actually look like.
Particularly once you start adding cell styling, or finding yourself inserting dynamically-sized data (requiring a bunch of cell offset math), the relative ease of designing and visualizing the template using a familiar idiom, HTML, can be make it much much easier to author and maintain these kinds of templates.
Features
General features include:
-
HTML elements as metaphors for structures in the resulting Excel document
Due to the obviously grid-oriented structure of Excel, the metaphors can sometimes be approximate, but should hopefully make intuitive sense!
For example:
<span>: An inline-block element which pushes elements after it to the right<div>: An block element which push elements after it downward<table>: Self-explanatory!
See the documentation about elements for more details
-
Styling
Some commonly/obviously useful and style options like width/height (
style="width: 50px") or rowspan/colspancolspan="2"have been implemented, but there's no reason that various different options that make intuitive sense (like colors) could be implemented alsoSee the documentation about styling for more details
-
Classes
While inline color styles are not (yet) implemented, one can supply classes normally,
class="class1 class2"and supply the definitions for those classes as inputs to the Workbookstyles = [ {"name": "odd", "pattern_fill": {"patternType": "solid", "fgColor": "FBEAFB"}}, ] Workbook(styles=styles)
Installation
There is no default parser (for HTML) included with a default installation of the package. We do this for both backwards compatibility and future compatibility reasons.
In order to keep the base package lean when one opts to use one or the other parser, we include a set of bundled parser-adaptor implementations for known supported parser libraries
To opt into the installation of the dependent library for the parser you chose:
# Slower, but more permissive
pip install htmxl[beautifulsoup]
# Faster, but more strict
pip install htmxl[lxml]
By default, the package will detect installed parser libraries and choose the first one we find, so
a vanilla Workbook() instantiation should Just Work.
However, we encourage users to explicitly select their parser to avoid inadvertant selection of the "wrong" parser at runtime (given that they have template compatibility issues)
from htmxl.compose import Workbook
workbook = Workbook(parser='beautifulsoup')
workbook = Workbook(parser='lxml')
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