This page shows a few examples of how you can interact with a web page using Python as the scripting language : create new elements, access and modify existing elements, create graphics, animations, send Ajax requests, etc.
The scripts use objects - elements shown in the page, styles applied to these elements, events, etc. - that are described in the Document Object Model (DOM), defined by the W3C. The reference used in this page is the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) documentation.
Although the DOM is by nature language-independant, most examples in the MDN documentation are written with Javascript, not (yet ;-) in Python. The translation is usually straightforward, since Brython supports all the DOM types and their attributes and methods.
In some cases, Brython adds a more Pythonic syntax : you will discover them by browsing the examples.
More documentation and examples can be found on the Brython site.
browser is a Brython-specific module that defines the objects
used to interact with the page.
document is an object representing the HTML document ;
document[element_id] is the element with attribute id equal
to element_id. In this example, document["button0"] is a
reference to the button you click on.
bind(event) is a method that returns a decorator,
applied to the function to call when the event occurs on the
element. When the user clicks on the element, this event is called
"click". The code means : when the user clicks on the element (here,
the button with the text "display an alert box"), call the function hello().
The function takes one argument, an object representing the event.
alert is used to display small popup windows.
The attributes and methods of the elements are described in the Document
Object Model (DOM), which is abundantly documented (by
Mozilla
for instance).
Brython supports all the DOM methods and attributes ; for text content
it provides a shortcut, textContent is an attribute of
Node instances ; it is used to get or set an element's text content.
text, so that the function body can
also be written :
def change(event):
document["zone1"].text = "New Content"
Elements have an attribute Look here for a reference on CSS.
Note that the attribute names that have a hyphen is CSS are written in camelCase in Python code : for instance, to set the CSS attribute style, which itself has (among many others) the attributes color (text color), backgroundColor (background color), fontWeigth ("bold" or "normal"), fontSize (size of the letters, in pixels), etc.
background-color, the syntax is style.backgroundColor
Elements have an attribute It is an instance of the class classList with the values set in the attribute class of the element.
DOMTokenList, which supports the methods add() and remove().
display is another attribute of style. Setting it to "none" hides the element.
This example uses the standard DOM methods to create elements ( Note that on the last line, we use the standard DOM method Also note the use of f-string for string formatting (PEP 448, introduced in Python 3.6) in the line
document.createElement(), createTextNode()) and append them to other elements or to the document (Node.appendChild()).
EventTarget.addEventListener() : the method bind() used in the other examples is Brython-specific.
txt = document.createTextNode(f" {nb}")
To create DOM elements, Brython provides the module To include an element inside another one, Brython uses the operator browser.html. It defines classes with the name of all the valid HTML tags in uppercase ; html.B("message") creates the element <B>message<B>
<= : think of it as a left arrow, not as "inferior or equal". The use of an operator is more concise and avoids having to use a function call.
We use the standard DOM method insertBefore()
and insert the element after element.nextSibling.
If the element is the last in its parent's children, nextSibling is null so the new element is inserted at
the end.
The attributes of a tag are defined as keyword arguments of the html classes constructor.
Note that the style attribute is passed as a dictionary ; also note that, since class is a Python keyword, it can't be used as a key, so we use Class instead (tag attributes are case-insensitive).
To build a table, we use the HTML tags The first attribute passed to the classes defined in Here we use a Python generator expression to include several headers (TABLE, TR, TH and TD.
browser.html is either a string, another instance of a class, or an iterator on such elements.
TH) in the first row (TR) of the table, and the same for the table cells (TD) in the next rows.
clear() is a method that removes all the element contents.
We build the dropdown menu by a SELECT element, using a generator expression with the OPTION elements displayed in the menu.
When the user changes the selected option in the menu, the event "change" is triggered on the SELECT box. This is done in the line
So far we have used the method In function A SELECT element has an attribute
dropdown.bind("change", show)
bind() as a decorator for a callback function, with the event name as single argument. It can also be used with the function as
the second argument.
show(event), event.target is the element itself.
selectedIndex, the rank of the selected item in the list of options, available by its attribute options. The OPTION element itself has an attribute value, here the option text.
We start by importing the module Canvas is an API for drawing geometric forms in the page. The examples on the MDN pages are written in Javascript but can be easily translated for Brython.
math, the same as in the Python standard distribution.
We have seen how to get an element by its id : The method document[element_id]. Here, document["zone13"] is the bordered box at the right of the button.
get(selector=css_selector) provides a way to select elements based on the CSS selector syntax. Passing the name of a tag returns a list of all the elements with this tag ; passing .zone returns a list of all the elements whose attribute class is set to "zone".
transform is another attribute of style that can make changes to the element, including a rotation by a specified angle.
The browser window provides 2 functions to start and stop an animation : When the user clicks on the button, the animation is started by calling the function In If the user clicks the button again, calling requestAnimationFrame and cancelAnimationFrame.
animloop with an arbitrary argument. window.requestAnimationFrame, called with the function itself as argument, returns a reference to the animation. The drawing function, render() is called ; the loop is then executed repeatedly under the control of the animation loop.
render(), to put the element at a specific location, we use another transform function, translate(x, y). The moving element bounces, and its shape changes, when its position reaches the box borders.
window.cancelAnimationFrame on the animation object stops the animation.
This example uses other mouse events than "click" : "mousedown", "mousemove" and "mouseup".
The mouse position is available by the attributes The position of an element can be changed by defining its attributes x, y of the event object.
left and top.
The Storage API allows local storage of key/value pairs.
Notice the use of method The event "change" on the INPUT field is triggered when the field loses focus, if the value has been modified.
elt.closest(tagName) to get the first DOM element with the specified tag name above elt.
The module Here we use a public API that gives the current position of the International Space Station. The callback function browser.ajax allows sending Ajax calls, ie sending HTTP requests to a URL and handle the reply without having to reload the page.
complete() is called when the Ajax call has completed ; its argument has an attribute responseText, the response sent by the server. In this case, the API tells us that it's a JSON string. We decode it with the module json of the standard distribution.
By default, Like in Python, the output can be reset by setting print() writes message in the browser console window (to open it, do Ctrl+Maj+K on Firefox, Ctrl+Maj+J on Chrome, F12 on IE, etc).
sys.stdout to an object with a method write().
Instead of using the XML modules in Python standard library, it's more efficient to use the Web API DOMParser to parse XML documents.
Brython provides the modules To use such objects, import the object Because the Javascript object We then use the attributes of the Javascript instance of time and datetime of the standard distribution, but it can also interact with the objects defined by Javascript.
window from module browser : it is used to get a reference to all the objects defined in the Javascript global namespace.
Date is a constructor (ie a function that returns new objects with the syntax var date = new Date()), we create Brython objects with the attribute new.
Date() such as getFullYear with the usual Python syntax.