[Tutor] generating formatted output

[Hugo Arts]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 10:16 PM, Rance Hall <ranceh at gmail.com> wrote:
> My app will be printing a series of documents that are the same each
> time the doc is printed with the exception of the variables.  Sort of
> a MailMerge if you will.
>
> It seems to me that the easiest approach is to create a series of text
> files with the layout and placeholders I need (again much like
> MailMerge)
>
> And then do something like this:
>
>    file = open(fileName, "r") #Opens the file in read-mode
>    text = file.read() #Reads the file and assigns the value to a variable
>    file.close() #Closes the file (read session)
>    text = text.replace(sourceText, replaceText)  #there will be a
> series of these.
>    file = open(fileName2, "w") #Opens a new file in write-mode.
>    file.write(text)
>    file.close() #Closes the file (write session)
>
> Then you can print the file or email it or whatever you need to do.
>
> There wont be too many of these replacements (think invoice template
> with substitutes for customer information and a billing detail
> section.)
>
> So my question is about the approach.  Is this reasonable? Is there a
> better way to do this?
>

I would suggest you take a look at string.Template or the str.format
method. It may be somewhat simpler than doing a whole lot of replaces,
perhaps faster as well.

http://docs.python.org/library/string.html#template-strings
http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#str.format

Hugo