TSV to HTML

[Brian]

First let me say that I appreciate the responses that everyone has
given.

A friend of mine is a ruby programmer but knows nothing about python.
He gave me the script below and it does exactly what I want, only it is
in Ruby.  Not knowing ruby this is greek to me, and I would like to
re-write it in python.

I ask then, is this essentially what others here have shown me to do,
or is it in a different vein all together?

Code:

class TsvToHTML
	@@styleBlock = <<-ENDMARK
	<style type='text/css'>
	td {
		border-left:1px solid #000000;
		padding-right:4px;
		padding-left:4px;
		white-space: nowrap;
	}
	.cellTitle {
		border-bottom:1px solid #000000;
		background:#ffffe0;
		font-weight: bold;
		text-align: center;
	}
	.cell0 { background:#eff1f1; }
	.cell1 { background:#f8f8f8; }
	</style>
	ENDMARK

	def TsvToHTML::wrapTag(data,tag,modifier = "")
		return "<#{tag} #{modifier}>" + data + "</#{tag}>\n"
	end # wrapTag

	def TsvToHTML::makePage(source)
		page = ""
		rowNum = 0
		source.readlines.each { |record|
			row = ""
			record.chomp.split("\t").each { |field|
				# replace blank fields with  
				field.sub!(/^$/," ")
				# wrap in TD tag, specify style
				row += wrapTag(field,"td","class=\"" +
				((rowNum == 0)?"cellTitle":"cell#{rowNum % 2}") +
				"\"")
			}
			rowNum += 1
			# wrap in TR tag, add row to page
			page += wrapTag(row,"tr") + "\n"
		}
		# finish page formatting
		[ [ "table","cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0" ], "body","html"
].each { |tag|
			page = wrapTag(@@styleBlock,"head") + page if tag == "html"
			page = wrapTag(page,*tag)
		}
		return page
	end # makePage
end # class

# stdin -> convert -> stdout
print TsvToHTML.makePage(STDIN)