The problem - Writing HTML can be a pain if you are doing it by hand. Things can be considerable improved if you can write Html in python style, using indentation instead closing tags to delimit blocks This is something that is shamelessly copied from Haskell’s hamlet templates.

How to use - <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body> <div> Here is some content will be expanded to <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <body> <div> Here is some content </div> </body> </html>

A special case - Suppose you want to create this html structure <html> <body> <div> Here is some content <span> content inside span </span> More content </div> </body> </html> If you attempt to make this using Dangler, <html> <body> <div> Here is some content <span> content inside span more content This will not work. The last line, ‘more content’ will not get added to the content inside the span. Instead it will get added to the parent div because it’s indentation matches the child elements of the div rather than the span. To add content that does not care about indentation, put a line with “”” only. This will start the ‘gather mode’ Which gathers all lines that follow until another “””, all by itself in a line The indentation for the content collected in the gather mode, is taken from the very first line after the first “”” is seen. So for our example, we can do something like this <html> <body> <div> Here is some content <span> """ content inside span more content """ If you want to have a line with “”” only, just escape it with a backslash.

Using with other template systems - Dangler does not do Html parsing. It just arranges the contents of a text file into a set of nested blocks. Things like closing the tags is done by extensions that process these nested blocks. Right now, Dangler has two extensions enabled by default that will work for Html and for Jinja2 files. If you run Dangler on this text, <html> <body> <div> Here is some content <span> content inside span more content {% if something %} <div> do this {% elif %} <div> do that {% if otherthing %} <span> so and so {% set a = f %} {% if not something %} {% set nav %} <div> something here {% for a = b %} <div> <div> do a {% elif other thing%} <table> <tr> <td> do other thing {% elif other someting %} <p> dont do anything! {% else %} <span> get something from user <input type="text"/> {% else %} <p> do something even nicer! It will be expanded to <html> <body> <div> Here is some content <span> content inside span </span> more content {% if something %} <div> do this </div> {% elif %} <div> do that </div> {% if otherthing %} <span> so and so </span> {% set a = f %} {% if not something %} {% set nav %} <div> something here </div> {% endset %} {% for a = b %} <div> <div> do a </div> </div> {% endfor %} {% elif other thing%} <table> <tr> <td> do other thing </td> </tr> </table> {% elif other someting %} <p> dont do anything! </p> {% endif %} {% else %} <span> get something from user </span> <input type="text"/> {% endif %} {% else %} <p> do something even nicer! </p> {% endif %} </div> </body> </html> Jinja2 support might be missing some tags. If you find one please post an issue or pull request.