Formatting text in Markdown

Markdown is a very popular markup language used to create plain text that can be converted into styled HTML. It is a good way of structuring documents in a way that they are still easy to read in plain text format, while being able to properly style them in HTML.

In this recipe, we'll see how to transform a Markdown document into styled HTML using Python.

Getting ready

We should start by installing the mistune module, which will compile Markdown documents into HTML:

$ echo "mistune==0.8.4" >> requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

In the GitHub repository, there is a template file called markdown_template.md with a template of the report to generate.

How to do it...

1. Import mistune and datetime:

   >>> import mistune
   >>> from datetime import datetime
   

2. Read the template from the file:

   >>> with open('markdown_template.md') as...