Creating a card from a template string instead of file

[BenjaminBossan]

I wanted to know if this would be something that could be added: Add a new class method from_string (or similar name) to initialize a ModelCard when the template is already stored as a string variable. That way, in some circumstances, we can avoid the "round-trip" through a file. Implementation-wise, it would be quite simple:

class ModelCard(RepoCard):
    @classmethod
    def from_template(
        cls,
        card_data: CardData,
        template_path: Optional[str] = TEMPLATE_MODELCARD_PATH,
        **template_kwargs,
    ):
        template_str = Path(template_path).read_text()
        return cls.from_string(card_data=card_data, template_str=template_str, **template_kwargs)

    @classmethod
    def from_string(
        cls,
        card_data: CardData,
        template_str: str,
        **template_kwargs,
    ):
        content = jinja2.Template(template_str).render(
            card_data=card_data.to_yaml(), **template_kwargs
        )
        return cls(content)

[adrinjalali]

instead of a new method, we could rename template_path to template, and either accept a file name or a file descriptor, and if the user already has the template in a string, they can pass it as a StringIO object.

[BenjaminBossan]

That would also be fine if we're okay with the possible backwards incompatibility caused by the renaming (instead, we could leave the parameter name as is, but that's a bit confusing).

[adrinjalali]

This hasn't been released really yet, so we could rename it I'd say. It's all happening here: https://github.com/huggingface/huggingface_hub/pull/940

[osanseviero]

Yes, feel free to open a PR against that PR as adding more features directly in the original PR would make the PR too large.

[nateraw]

Yea after using this tool for a while, this feature is definitely something that's come up as a need. I think you can either PR against my PR, or we can wait until mine is merged and I'll add this as an additional feature.

The PR is getting pretty big so I prefer the latter, but wouldn't complain if you did the former either. 🍻

Just depends on how urgently you'd like this 😉

[nateraw]

Though it is a pretty small addition so maybe it would be fine to add...

[BenjaminBossan]

There is no urgency, it would just be a convenient feature. The only reason to include it earlier rather than later is if we go with the proposal to rename the argument. Up to you to decide what you prefer.

[nateraw]

It's also pretty easy to do template string w/ f-strings, which might be a common use case...

from modelcards import ModelCard, CardData

data = CardData(license='mit', language='en', tags=['cardtest'])
content = f"""
---
{data.to_yaml()}
---

# My Model

blah blah blah
"""

card = ModelCard(content)

I'd probably encourage folks to use this unless they really needed Jinja, as we're going to have to have the Jinja dep be optional in huggingface_hub.