utility functions within a class?

Sun May 7 19:54:56 EDT 2006

I might be missing something obvious here, but I decided to experiment 
with writing a program that involves a class, so I'm somewhat new to 
this in Python.

Anyway, what is the best way to create a function (A) within a class 
that another function (B) can use? Function A is not something that an 
instance will ever call, so I figure it's a choice between static or 
class methods, but I don't know which one, or if this is even the right 
approach.

Specifically, I am writing a class that defines methods that wrap string 
arguments inside HTML elements, and ultimately creates and HTML page. I 
know there are probably a ton of programs like this already, but this is 
just to give me something to do with Python.

So I have a generate() method that will create the final HTML file once 
you are done creating elements. First it will create a string with the 
proper DTD, then it will append the <head> element and the <body> 
element, wrapped in the <html> element.

Rather than have the generate() function do all the work, I thought I 
could write two utility functions to generate the head and body 
elements. These would simply wrap the element names around some 
pre-defined text (for the head) and around all the other elements (for 
the body).

So I'm wondering, how would I define these two functions? They would be 
called from the generate method solely for the purpose of creating the 
head and body blocks.

Thanks!