Re: [Docutils-users] Using Front-End tools from within Python

[David G. <go...@py...>]

Pierre-Yves Delens wrote:
 > after a long end-user practice of Docutils/DocfFctory, and a
 > couple of tests of command Lines for Front-End tools ,
 > I need to write small Python scripts.
 > Just making basically the same  as command-lines, but in
 > batch instructions and parametrizable calls.
 > Example :
 >     C:\Python\LTF\DocutilsTools\rst2html.py %f %p%n.html -o
 > iso-8859-1
 >
 > Sorry for a newbie question :
 > Do you people have some sample code/snippets about this ?

Take a look at rst2html.py.  Notice that apart from a bit of
environment setup, there's only three interesting statements:

from docutils.core import publish_cmdline, default_description
description = ('Generates (X)HTML documents from standalone '
                'reStructuredText sources.  ' + default_description)
publish_cmdline(writer_name='html', description=description)

The first statement imports what we need.  The second is only useful
for command-line tools.  The third statement calls Docutils, which
does all the work.

You probably want to use one of the other convenience functions in
docutils.core, either publish_file, publish_string, or publish_parts.
You can supply your parameters with "settings_overrides", mapping
setting names to values:

     settings_overrides = {'output_encoding': 'iso-8859-1'}

Take a look at docutils.examples.html_parts to see one convenience
function in operation.  Please feel free to ask more questions.

-- David Goodger