Is there a native templating system for plain text files in Python?

Question

I am looking for either technique or templating system for Python for formatting output to simple text. What I require is that it will be able to iterate through multiple lists or dicts. It would be nice if I would be able to define template into separate file (like output.templ) instead of hardcoding it into source code.

As simple example what I want to achieve, we have variables title, subtitle and list

title = 'foo' subtitle = 'bar' list = ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday'] 

And running throught a template, output would look like this:

Foo Bar  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday 

How to do this? Thank you.

Answer 1

You can use the standard library string an its Template class.

Having a file foo.txt:

$title $subtitle $list 

And the processing of the file (example.py):

from string import Template  d = {     'title': 'This is the title',     'subtitle': 'And this is the subtitle',     'list': '\n'.join(['first', 'second', 'third']) }  with open('foo.txt', 'r') as f:     src = Template(f.read())     result = src.substitute(d)     print(result) 

Then run it:

$ python example.py This is the title And this is the subtitle first second third