sphinx-doc/sphinx

Support variable definitions in literalinclude's pyobject option

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#6,119 opened on Mar 1, 2019

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help wantedmarkuptype:enhancement

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Description

The :pyobject: option of the literalinclude directive is great for including only a specific definition of a module. Currently (Sphinx 1.8.4), it supports class and function definitions. I suggest to extend this to also support module-level variable definitions.

An example from my personal use case: I use collections.namedtuple in my code for creating simple record-like classes:

MyClass = namedtuple('MyClass', 'attribute1, attribute2')

Since they don't use a "real" class definition, I cannot show their definition using :pyobject:.

A possible alternative to supporting variable definitions in :pyobject: which might be more flexible would be to support grepping lines using a regex. I could then do

.. literalinclude:: my_module.py
   :regex: ^MyClass\s*=

Contributor guide

Research direction
Examine how Sphinx's literalinclude directive currently resolves pyobject for classes and functions, then extend the logic to detect module level variable assignments.
Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
PythonSphinx
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
60