Generating Documents With Jinja2 and YAML

Quick example of generating documents by rendering data from a YAML file through a Jinja2 template. The target output is Latex vhistory data (revs.tex) which will be included in main document (main.tex). The output is generated by a Python script (create_revs_tex.py) from YAML data (revs.yaml).

import yaml
from jinja2 import Template

# For this example, assume that stdout will be redirected to `revs.tex`.
# In the template, the `{#--#}` entries are used to eat unwanted whitespace.
print Template(r"""
{#--#}
\begin{versionhistory}
{%- for r in revs %}
    \vhEntry {#- -#}
    { {{- r.number -}} } {#--#}
    { {{- r.date -}} } {#--#}
    { {{- r.author -}} } {#--#}
    { {{- r.comments -}} }
{%- endfor %}
\end{versionhistory}
""").render(revs=yaml.load(open("revs.yaml")))