Python file.write within html tags

Question

I'm just starting with Python, one of my first scripts is to be a very simple work log. I run it, when i finish work I press enter and it puts worktime into html file that I share with guy who hire me.

Here is the code, please do not facepalm too much, these are my first steps:

#!/usr/bin/python
import datetime
start = datetime.datetime.now()
startt = str(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))
print "Counting worktime started."
confirm = raw_input("Press enter when work finished ")
finish = datetime.datetime.now()
delta = finish - start
print datetime.datetime.now()
print delta.seconds
work_time=str(datetime.timedelta(seconds=delta.seconds))
finisht=str(datetime.datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"))
note = raw_input("What were you doing? ")
line1=['<span>','Work started: <b>', startt, '</b></span><br />']
line1f=' '.join(line1)
line2=['<span>','Work ended: <b>', finisht, '</b></span><br />']
line2f=' '.join(line2)
line3=['<span>','Work duration: <b>', work_time,'</b></span><br />']
line3f=' '.join(line3)
line4=['<span>','Note: <b>', note,'</b></span><br /><br />']
line4f=' '.join(line4)
with open("/srv/www/worklog.html","a") as worklog:
    worklog.write(line1f)
    worklog.write("\n")
    worklog.write(line2f)
    worklog.write("\n")
    worklog.write(line3f)
    worklog.write("\n")
    worklog.write(line4f)
    worklog.write("\n")
    worklog.write("<span> ========================= </span><br /><br />")
    worklog.write("\n")

and here is the worklog.html file:

<html>
<head></head>
<body style="background-color: #195B83;color:#FFF;margin: 0px;">
    <style>
        span {font-size: 12px;margin-left: 5px;}
        .logo {float: right;margin-right: 10px;margin-top:5px;}
        .first-div {background-color: #FFF; color:#195B83;width:100%;}
        .sec-div {margin-left: 5px;}
    </style>
    <div class="first-div">
        <img src="logo.png" class="logo" />
        <div class="sec-div">
            <h1>simple worklog 1.0</h2>
        </div>
    </div>
    <br />
    <span> ========================= </span><br /><br />
    <span> Work started: <b> 2014-09-11 13:40:26 </b></span> <br />
    <span> Work ended: <b> 2014-09-11 13:40:29 </b></span> <br />
    <span> Work duration: <b> 0:00:02 </b></span> <br />
    <span> Note: <b> Testing </b></span><br /><br />
    <span> ========================= </span><br /><br />

And it works!

My question is - how can I include

</body></html>

tags? I tried with .replace, but my experiments failed with whole file purged. Can you give me a hint on how to make this script to keep them at the end of worklog.html ?

EDIT:

Thanks to awesome hints below, I have rewritten the code and I think that now it has a lot more sense, you can find it here:

main_script (add log to csv and add data to the website): http://pastebin.com/ZbCqJ9p9

page_refresher (no worklog adding, just put the data on website): http://pastebin.com/3hi077RK

template (with bootstrap css): http://pastebin.com/xZ7VmE1U

data files format: http://pastebin.com/0KNAXuqh

and it looks like that: http://elysium.c-call.eu/sworklog/

It's surely not the highest class and has some issues, but it's a lot better than the piece of crap I came here with :)

Thank you very much.

Agate · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-11 15:17:41Z

4

I think a cleaner solution would be to slightly change your process.

Instead of logging directly to HTML file, you should consider storing your data (start time, and end time) into a CSV file (or a text file, or a SQLite database, or whatever you want). Python as a built-in library for working with CSV files.

Then, you can run another script that will grab the data, process it and produce a HTML page. Since you will be recreating the HTML page each time, you don't have to bother with inserting your new data at the right place in your HTML.

It's a good practice to separate data from presentation, because it makes it easier to reuse your data in various place. In this example, if you keep your data in a in a CSV file, you can also open it with a spreadsheet application and make fancy graphs and charts for your employer ;)

edited Sep 11, 2014 at 15:17

answered Sep 11, 2014 at 14:37

Agate

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3 Comments

Karl M.W. Over a year ago

+1. You'll probably find it's invaluable having a means of looking back on your work. You'll be able to produce your own weekly/monthly reports, pull things out of archives, etc. It'd be a great learning exercise and project. Then you might want to look at building it as a Django or Flask project :)

Keios Solutions Over a year ago

i updated the main post with pastebin links, now my code is using CSV as you suggested and mako for templating as @alecxe suggested. with some templating, it really did magic :)

Agate Over a year ago

Thanks for sharing, you're code is much easier to read now :)

alecxe · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-11 14:51:52Z

2

Do not reinvent the wheel by constructing HTML manually using string concatenation. This makes things less readable, explicit, more complicated, difficult to maintain, error-prone. There are specialized tools, that would make it so much easier and pleasant.

Consider using a template engine, like jinja2 or mako.

Basically, you would create an HTML template with placeholders, which would be filled with data while rendering.

Example using mako template engine.

consider you have a template named template.html with the following content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>${title}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <span>
        Work started: ${work_time}
    </span>
</body>
</html>

this is what your rendering code may look like:

from datetime import date
from mako.template import Template


template = Template(filename='template.html')

title = 'Test page'
work_time = date.today()
print template.render(title=title, work_time=work_time)

It prints:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Test page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <span>
        Work started: 2014-09-11
    </span>
</body>
</html>

Or, alternatively, you can construct the HTML tag by tag inside the Python code.

Example using BeautifulSoup:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


soup = BeautifulSoup()
html = soup.new_tag(name='html')
body = soup.new_tag(name='body')

span = soup.new_tag(name="span")
span.append(soup.new_string('Work started:'))

body.append(span)
html.append(body)
soup.append(html)

print soup.prettify()

Prints:

<html>
 <body>
  <span>
   Work started:
  </span>
 </body>
</html>

edited Sep 11, 2014 at 14:51

answered Sep 11, 2014 at 14:39

alecxe

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2 Comments

alecxe Over a year ago

@user2902282 thanks, just thought real code would be more helpful in this case than theoretical advices.

Keios Solutions Over a year ago

i was just looking for hints and I surely got a nice one from you, that's how i learn. i used mako in my code (updated the main post with pastebin links), works pretty awesome.

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