How do I unparse restructured text back into an rst file?

Question

My question is a follow up to How to parse restructuredtext in python? where @mbdevpl provided code for parsing the file into a tree and doing some processing on the tree.

I want to autoformat Python code in RST files. Now that I've discovered the code blocks in the tree and changed their contents, how do I write the changes back over the original file? Right now I'm doing this with regexes.

You could use a package like https://rst.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ — Tom Dalton, Feb 24 '21 at 14:47

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 01 '23 at 05:35

Considering the lack of a good solution in my own searching, I would suggest a paragraph from https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/dev/hacking.html#parsing-the-document, which is linked in your previous question.

To get an HTML document out of the node tree, we use a Writer, the HTML writer in this case (docutils/writers/html4css1.py).

The writer receives the node tree and returns the output document. For HTML output, we can test this using the rst2html.py tool:

So you need a writer of some sort. One for html exists, and perhaps you could pipe that output to html2rst

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 08 '23 at 21:01

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An rST writer for Docutils is a long standing TODO item. To generate reStructuredText documents with Docutils, you may try the XML (Docutils native) writer and the contributed xml2rst processor in the Docutils "sandbox".

answered May 08 '23 at 21:01

G. Milde

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How do I unparse restructured text back into an rst file?

2 Answers2

Linked