Use plasTeX on short strings - html

Question

I'm trying to find a python package which will convert short strings like
A closed-form solution of
$\textbf{R}\textbf{R}_1=\textbf{R}_2\textbf{R}$
w.r.t $\textbf{R}$
to a reasonable HTML representation, like
A closed-form solution of
<i><b>R</b><b>R<b><sub>1</sub> = <b>R</b><sub>2</sub> <b>R</b></i>
w.r.t <i><b>R</b></i>
No LaTeX packages or document layout commands (\section etc.) will be involved; just the subset of TeX allowed in stackexchange postings.
While Mathjax does handle this beautifully, unfortunately Javascript options are off the table, as this is for an email digest--it has to be static HTML output. Inline CSS is fine. I know there's a Node.js version of Mathjax that can approximate its output in static form (with a buhc of caveats about how the result won't be browser-responsive and other things I don't care about), but I want Python.
The best option I've found seems to be plasTeX, but all the documentation there seems to be about converting whole .tex files to .html, or, for some reason, .xml files, which is much more than I want to do.
I suppose, if need be, I could generate temporary .html files and then use BeautifulSoup to parse out only the part I'm interested in, but this seems a bit silly. Since I'm talking about doing this maybe 50 times per script invocation, this would certainly be doable.
Is there a simple way to use plasTeX or any other python package to get html equivalents of short latex snippets?

Answer 1

You may find https://github.com/alvinwan/TexSoup useful. Using this library, you could replace the boldfaced parts in two lines. Although a sufficient number of regexes could do, TexSoup gives you a bit more flexibility.
from TexSoup import TexSoup
soup = TexSoup(r"$\textbf{R}\textbf{R}_1=\textbf{R}_2\textbf{R}$")
for b in soup.find_all('textbf'):
b.replace("<b>{args[0]}</b>".format(args=b.args))