rstcheck 3.1

Checks syntax of reStructuredText and code blocks nested within it.

Contents

• Installation
• Supported languages in code blocks
• Examples
• Options
• Ignore specific languages
• Configuration
• Sphinx
• Usage in Vim
• Use as a module
• History
  • 3.1 (2017-03-08)
  • 3.0.1 (2017-03-01)
  • 3.0 (2016-12-19)
  • 2.0 (2015-07-27)
  • 1.0 (2015-03-14)
  • 0.1 (2013-12-02)

Installation

From pip:

$ pip install rstcheck

Supported languages in code blocks

• Bash
• Doctest
• C (C99)
• C++ (C++11)
• JSON
• XML
• Python
• reStructuredText

Examples

With bad Python syntax:

====
Test
====

.. code:: python

    print(

$ rstcheck bad_python.rst
bad_python.rst:7: (ERROR/3) (python) unexpected EOF while parsing

With bad C++ syntax:

====
Test
====

.. code:: cpp

    int main()
    {
        return x;
    }

$ rstcheck bad_cpp.rst
bad_cpp.rst:9: (ERROR/3) (cpp) error: 'x' was not declared in this scope

With bad syntax in the reStructuredText document itself:

====
Test
===

$ rstcheck bad_rst.rst
bad_rst.rst:1: (SEVERE/4) Title overline & underline mismatch.

Options

usage: rstcheck [-h] [--report level] [--ignore-language language]
                [--ignore-directives directives]
                [--ignore-substitutions substitutions] [--ignore-roles roles]
                [--debug] [--version]
                files [files ...]

Checks code blocks in reStructuredText.

positional arguments:
  files                 files to check

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --report level        report system messages at or higher than level; info,
                        warning, error, severe, none (default: info)
  --ignore-language language, --ignore language
                        comma-separated list of languages to ignore
  --ignore-directives directives
                        comma-separated list of directives to ignore
  --ignore-substitutions substitutions
                        comma-separated list of substitutions to ignore
  --ignore-roles roles  comma-separated list of roles to ignore
  --debug               show helpful for debugging
  --version             show program's version number and exit

Ignore specific languages

You can ignore checking of nested code blocks by language. Either use the command-line option --ignore or put a comment in the document:

.. rstcheck: ignore-language=cpp,python,rst

Configuration

If your project has custom roles and directives, you can specify them in the local configuration of the project. rstcheck looks for a file .rstcheck.cfg in the directory or ancestor directory of the file it is checking.

For example, consider a project with the following directory structure:

docs
├── foo
│   └── bar.rst
├── index.rst
└── .rstcheck.cfg

.rstcheck.cfg contains:

[rstcheck]
ignore_directives=one,two,three
ignore_roles=src,RFC

bar.rst contains:

Bar
===

:src:`hello_world.py`
:RFC:`793`

.. one::

   Hello

rstcheck will make use of the .rstcheck.cfg:

$ rstcheck docs/foo/bar.rst

Sphinx

To enable Sphinx:

$ pip install sphinx

The installed Sphinx version must be at least 1.5.

To check that Sphinx support is enabled:

$ rstcheck -h | grep 'Sphinx is enabled'

Usage in Vim

To check reStructuredText in Vim using Syntastic:

let g:syntastic_rst_checkers = ['rstcheck']

Use as a module

rstcheck.check() yields a series of tuples. The first value of each tuple is the line number (not the line index). The second value is the error message.

>>> import rstcheck
>>> list(rstcheck.check('Example\n==='))
[(2, '(INFO/1) Possible title underline, too short for the title.')]

Note that this does not load any configuration as that would mutate the docutils registries.

History

3.1 (2017-03-08)

• Add support for checking XML code blocks (thanks to Sameer Singh).

3.0.1 (2017-03-01)

• Support UTF-8 byte order marks (BOM). Previously, docutils would interpret the BOM as a visible character, which would lead to false positives about underlines being too short.

3.0 (2016-12-19)

• Optionally support Sphinx 1.5. Sphinx support will be enabled if Sphinx is installed.

2.0 (2015-07-27)

• Support loading settings from configuration files.

1.0 (2015-03-14)

• Add Sphinx support.

0.1 (2013-12-02)

• Initial version.