Automatically insert data into a reStructuredText file

By Olivier Carrère

Suppose you need to present three products: Dianthus, Geum, and Prunus, each available in versions 1.0, 1.5, and 2.3.

Instead of manually entering data into the content file, you can automate this process using Jinja and Python — the same templating engine used for conditional text profiling.

Create the following template.rst file:

Products and Versions
=====================

{% for prod in products %}
{{ prod | capitalize }}
{% for c in prod %}-{% endfor %}
   {% for ver in versions %}
- {{ ver }}
   {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

Create the following Python script populate.py:

#!/usr/bin/python
# coding: utf-8
import jinja2

env = jinja2.Environment(loader=jinja2.FileSystemLoader('./'))

template = env.get_template('template.rst')

data = {
    'products': ['dianthus', 'geum', 'prunus'],
    'versions': ['1.0', '1.5', '2.3']
}
print(template.render(data))

Make the script executable, then run it:

chmod +x populate.py
./populate.py

The following output is displayed:

Products and Versions
=====================

Dianthus
--------

- 1.0

- 1.5

- 2.3


Geum
----

- 1.0

- 1.5

- 2.3


Prunus
------

- 1.0

- 1.5

- 2.3

This approach minimizes the risk of errors and reduces the effort involved in updating.

Additional resources

Automatically insert SQL data into a reStructuredText file

Automatically insert data into a reStructuredText file

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