[Docutils-users] extract code from code directive from restructuredtext using docutils

[Mark A. <mja...@gm...>]

(I asked the following question on stackoverflow two days ago. It has not
been given any answers or even comments and very few views, so I was hoping
that it would ok to ask it again here.)

I would like to extract out the source code verbatim from code directives
in a restructuredtext string.

What follows is my first attempt at doing this, but I would like to know if
there is a better (i.e. more robust, or more general, or more direct) way
of doing it.

Let's say I have the following rst text as a string in python:

s = '''

My title
========

Use this to square a number.

.. code:: python

   def square(x):
       return x**2

and here is some javascript too.

.. code:: javascript

    foo = function() {
        console.log('foo');
    }

'''

To get the two code blocks, I could do

from docutils.core import publish_doctree

doctree = publish_doctree(s)
source_code = [child.astext() for child in doctree.children if 'code'
in child.attributes['classes']]

Now *source_code* is a list with just the verbatim source code from the two
code blocks. I could also use the *attributes* attribute of *child* to find
out the code types too, if necessary.

It does the job, but is there a better way?