preppy 2.3.4

preppy - a Preprocessor for Python

Preppy is ReportLab’s templating system. It has been in continuous production use since 2000.

It was released as open source code but never evangelized. We are putting it out on PyPI now because many of our solutions depend on it, and this makes it a lot easier to install (e.g. with a pip requirements file).

Preppy is a single Python module which should be placed directly on the path (i.e. you access it with ‘import preppy’). The setup script does this, but it’s just as effective to grab it from the repo and drop it into your project.

Preppy aims to be absolutely minimal. You embed Python expressions and control structures in your template. It compiles the template into a .pyc file. A preppy template is exactly equivalent to a Python function which accepts parameters and returns text output. We don’t both with include functions, block nesting, filters or any other fancy stuff, because we already have a perfectly good language to do that in.

Preppy is just Python, so you get proper Python tracebacks, with the original line number in the .prep file; you can happily debug through calls to python, preppy, python and more preppy.

Currently the docs and tests are rather old-fashioned, because this dates back to before the unittest module, Sphinx and so on. We’re working on this. It also has ‘more than one way to do things’, which we will be simplifying and deprecating soon before making it available on Python 3.x.

BSD license. See LICENSE.txt for details

• Andy Robinson, ReportLab, March 2013