Introduction

What is TIE ?

The TIE library provides a set of classes and utilities to facilitate the definition of very simple, personal template languages.

The library provides a basic substitution engine based on regular expressions, which doesn’t recognize any particular syntax by itself; it’s up to the user to provide it with his own tag patterns as well as their optional, custom behaviour.

TIE also provides simple tools to ease the definition of those custom tags, and aims to allow for easy customisation or extension (either by providing callbacks or by subclassing the provided types).

Do I need it ?

Maybe. Maybe not.

If you need a full-fledged template engine, with lots of features and good performances, then TIE is probably not for you. You’ll be far better off using an already established template language - Quite a lot of them are already part of the python ecosystem and have more than proven themselves. Trying to emulate one of those with TIE might be possible, but will surely prove very cumbersome and inneficient.

Note

If you’re looking for a lightweight, but more featured template engine, I’d like to recommend pyratemp. I like the author’s “simple is better” philosophy, and his thoughts on template engines have been a nice source of inspiration for TIE.

On the other hand, TIE might still be overkill if your requirements are very simple. Python’s batteries include a very nice and quite powerful string formatting syntax, and also provides a Template class for slightly more complex operations. Those built-in features might be more than sufficient for what you have in mind. (See http://docs.python.org/2/library/string.html for more info on python’s string operations.)

TIE aims to step in when python’s built-in tools might be enough for the job, but become too unwieldy to handle the task in a straight-forward way.

Installation

You can install TIE by simply using pip (this is the recomanded way):

pip install tie

If you must, you can also use easy_install:

easy_install tie

Alternativeley, you could also clone the project’s repository and run the setup script:

git clone https://github.com/raphigaziano/TIE
cd TIE/
python setup.py install

Getting Started

For most basic uses, rendering a template with TIE involves 3 simple steps:

• Register your tag patterns
• Wrap your template(s) text in (a) Template object(s)
• Pass your templates the data they need to render them

A naive exemple could look like this:

>>> import tie
>>> # Register a tag pattern
>>> tie.tag.register("name")
>>> # Instanciate a Template object
>>> my_template = tie.Template("Hello, name!")
>>> # Render it!
>>> res = my_template(name="raphi")
>>> print(res)
Hello, raphi!
>>> res = my_template(name="Darth Vader, lord of the sith")
>>> print(res)
Hello, Darth Vader, lord of the sith!

Note

For testing purposes, I’m using the python 3 print function here, but this should work just as well with the python 2.x syntax. Adjust the code accordingly, or add a from __future__ import print_function statement before running this code.

While this exemple is way too simple to be useful, the basic process it illustrates should be able to handle a lot of common situations.

Head on to the TIE tutorial to start using TIE the right way !