PyFPDF, HTMLMixin, Python Unable to print HTML

Question

I am unable to output an HTML message using PyFPDF. When I attempt to write the HTML to the PDF document I get an error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/elcid/Projects/so_test/test.py", line 8, in <module>
    pdf.write_html("<b>Sample HTML</b>")
  File "/Users/elcid/.pyenv/versions/so/lib/python3.9/site-packages/fpdf/html.py", line 400, in write_html
    text = h2p.unescape(text) # To deal with HTML entities
AttributeError: 'HTML2FPDF' object has no attribute 'unescape'

The offending code:

from fpdf import FPDF, HTMLMixin

class PDF(FPDF, HTMLMixin):
    pass

pdf = PDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("<b>Sample HTML</b>")
pdf.output("html.pdf")

I am using Python 3.9. Any insight? Thank you!

Answer 1

This appears to be a bug in PyFPDF. Internally, the write_html method tries to escape the HTML by calling the unescape method of a subclass of Python's HTMLParser class, rather than simply calling html.unescape as it should.

PyFPDF hasn't been updated in six years and is no longer actively maintained. I'd recommend trying its modern fork and successor, fpdf2.

The example from the documentation appears to run fine:

from fpdf import FPDF, HTMLMixin

class PDF(FPDF, HTMLMixin):
    pass

pdf = PDF()
pdf.add_page()
pdf.write_html("""
  <h1>Big title</h1>
  <section>
    <h2>Section title</h2>
    <p><b>Hello</b> world. <u>I am</u> <i>tired</i>.</p>
    <p><a href="https://github.com/PyFPDF/fpdf2">PyFPDF/fpdf2 GitHub repo</a></p>
    <p align="right">right aligned text</p>
    <p>i am a paragraph <br />in two parts.</p>
    <font color="#00ff00"><p>hello in green</p></font>
    <font size="7"><p>hello small</p></font>
    <font face="helvetica"><p>hello helvetica</p></font>
    <font face="times"><p>hello times</p></font>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Other section title</h2>
    <ul><li>unordered</li><li>list</li><li>items</li></ul>
    <ol><li>ordered</li><li>list</li><li>items</li></ol>
    <br>
    <br>
    <pre>i am preformatted text.</pre>
    <br>
    <blockquote>hello blockquote</blockquote>
    <table width="50%">
      <thead>
        <tr>
          <th width="30%">ID</th>
          <th width="70%">Name</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          <td>1</td>
          <td>Alice</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>2</td>
          <td>Bob</td>
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    </table>
  </section>
""")
pdf.output("html.pdf")

Make sure to uninstall PyFPDF, since they use the same module name.