#56 :key:value not caught as badly formed option, but rather taken as an argument

[Robin Shannon]

If your mistype your reST directive like this:

.. directive:: argument
:key:value (note the lack of a space between ":" and "v")

docutils interprests this as a directive with two arguments (argument, :key:value) instead on one argument and an option key value pair. It seems like it would be nice if there was a check for the final argument given (if more than one argument is given) along the lines of:

_emptystr, key, _emptystr, value = re.split(r"^\:(.?)\:(.?)", arg)
if key in self.option_spec and key not in self.options:
RAISE WARNING

[Günter Milde]

Thank you for the suggestion. Howerver, this is a feature request, not a bug. You may reopen it under https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/feature-requests/ or start a thread in the docutils-devel list.

You may experiment with the code in parsers/rst/states.py around line 2170 and the parse_directive_options method at line 2191.
Tested patches are welcome.

BTW: The interpretation of the given example depends on the directive, it could be one multi-line argument as in

.. admonition:: test
      :me:not

      Content

or just content as in

.. hint:: some directives have
      :no:arguments.

[Günter Milde]

Ticket moved from /p/docutils/bugs/330/