Jinja2 Quick Load Function

It seems like that for every few weeks I find myself needing to generate something out of a template while working outside a framework. For this task, my preferred solution is [Jinja2](https://jinja.pocoo.org/). I've used Jinja2 to generate HTML, code, and text. If I were brave enough I would even say I've used it to generate XML (*While my preferred xml tool is great for parsing, even lxml is not so much fun for XML generation*). I frequently use this snippet of code to render templates. Since I'm tired of digging through my code to find it, I'm placing it here for personal reference. ``` python from jinja2 import FileSystemLoader, Environment def render_from_template(directory, template_name, **kwargs): loader = FileSystemLoader(directory) env = Environment(loader=loader) template = env.get_template(template_name) return template.render(**kwargs) ``` Sample usage: ``` python >>> from simple_script import render_from_template >>> data = { ... "date": "June 12, 2014", ... "items": ["oranges", "bananas", "steak", "milk"] ... } >>> render_from_template(".", "shopping_list.html", **data) ``` I've thought about packaging this up with [cookiecutter-pypackage](https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter-pypackage) and placing it on [PyPI](https://pypi.python.org/pypi), but I think it might be overkill. **Update 2014/06/12:** Fixed cookiecutter link thanks to <https://github.com/dirn>