Lina is a template engine in the spirit of Google's CTemplate written in Python 3. It can be used to generate any kind of text-based documents. Lina has been used since several years in a large C/C++ project to generate code.

Until late August 2014, this library was known as Miranda.

Python 3.4 or later. Previous versions of Python will not work due to the lack of enumerations.

Lina is available from PyPi, so you can install directly using pip:

pip install lina

The most trivial template is:

Hello {{name}}!

It can be evaluated using

import lina
template = lina.Template ('Hello {{name}}!')
print (template.RenderSimple (name = "Bob"))

This will print:

Hello Bob!

The real power comes from blocks which can be repeated and nested. For instance:

{{#Users}}Hello {{name}}!{{/Users}

rendered with

Users = [{'name':'Alice'}, {'name':'Bob'}]

will print:

Hello Alice!Hello Bob!

This can be further improved by using formatters. A formatter modifies a value just before it is written to the output stream. Lina comes with a set of predefined formatters like upper-case transformation. Formatters can be defined for values or blocks. A good example for a block-level formatter is the list-separator formatter. If we change the template of the previous example to:

{{#Users:list-separator=NEWLINE}}Hello {{name}}!{{/Users}

the result will be:

Hello Alice!
Hello Bob!

Value-level formatters are for example the upper-case formatter. {{value:upper-case}} with value set to Test will result in TEST.