Re: [Docutils-develop] Minimal narrow-purpose reST converter program

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

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 18:30, Ben Finney <ben...@be...> wrote:
> David Goodger <go...@py...> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:03, Ben Finney <ben...@be...> wrote:
>> > My reading of the Docutils API documentation indicates that a Writer
>> > usually lives inside a separate module.
>
> For reference, I got this impression from PEP 258:
>
>    Each writer is a module or package exporting a "Writer" class with a
>    "write" method.
>
>    <URL:http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0258/#writers>

That's for the general case of library code that's available to client
code. Your case has a specific, single-purpose writer.

> I couldn't find a more up-to-date description of the architecture where
> it might have said writers can simply be classes and not necessarily
> entire modules.

You have to read between the lines, or better yet: use the source, Luke! ;-)

>> > Is it possible to define a Writer class and use it directly within
>> > the same program module?
>>
>> Sure, no problem:
>>
>> """
>> from docutils.core import publish_cmdline, default_description
>> from docutils import writers
>>
>> description = ('[custom text]  ' + default_description)
>>
>> class MyWriter(writers.Writer):
>>     # custom writer code here
>>
>> publish_cmdline(writer=MyWriter(), description=description)
>> """
>>
>> See existing front-end tools,
>> http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/api/cmdline-tool.html, and
>> http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/api/publisher.html for more
>> details.
>
> Thanks. I kept seeing reference only to the ‘writer_name’ argument, so
> that gives the impression that writers can only be referenced by the
> name of a writer module.

The docutils.core module has lots of API docs in the docstrings (hint, hint).

-- 
David Goodger <http://python.net/~goodger>