Using other languages with Pylatex

Question

I'm trying to get hebrew to pring into a pdf using pylatex. In a sample hebrew .tex file that I'm trying to emulate the format of, the header looks like this:

%\title{Hebrew document in WriteLatex - מסמך בעברית}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,hebrew]{babel}
\selectlanguage{hebrew}
\usepackage[top=2cm,bottom=2cm,left=2.5cm,right=2cm]{geometry}

I was able to emulate this entire header except for the line \selectlanguage{hebrew}. I'm not sure how I should go about getting this in my .tex file using pylatex. The code for generating the rest of the file is:

doc = pylatex.Document('basic', inputenc = 'utf8x', lmodern = False, fontenc = None, textcomp = None)

    packages = [Package('babel', options = ['english', 'hebrew']), Package('inputenc', options = 'utf8enc')]
    doc.packages.append(Package('babel', options = ['english', 'hebrew']))

    doc.append(text.decode('utf-8'))
    doc.generate_pdf(clean_tex=False, compiler = "XeLaTeX ")
    doc.generate_tex()

And the header of the .tex file generated is:

\documentclass{article}%
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}%
\usepackage{lastpage}%
\usepackage[english,hebrew]{babel}%

How do you get the selectlanguage line there? I'm pretty new to latex so I apologize for not being so accurate with my terminology.

Answer 1

It has been a little while since i used PyLaTeX, and it has done several large, breaking changes in the last few years.

But I believe:

doc.preamble.append(Command('selectlanguage', 'hebrew'))

should do it.

You could define SelectLanguage as an extension of CommandBase, but I don't think it is worth it, for a command you are only calling once.

So just use the generic Command(commandname, arg) function