Re: [Docutils-users] escaping Text so that's docutils doesn't try to format it?

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

On 4 June 2018 at 09:39, Erik Stein <st...@ma...> wrote:
>
> Hello --
>
> I'm using docutils to semi-automatically construct certain content pages.
> I've got the problem that sometimes people enter text which in the context
> of a restructured text file has some semantical meaning, but this is not the
> intention in the actual case.
>
> E.g.
>
> "v. l. Donald Trump, Kim Jong UN"
>
> where "v. l." means "from left to right" in a photo.
>
> Docutils interprets this as a roman numbered list (my guess, this is in the
> context of a figure

You are correct that Docutils is interpreting this text as a list. In
fact, this specific text will be interpreted as two nested
lowercase-alphabetic enumerated lists.

> is there a (python) function in docutils which allows to escape a string in
> a way that docutils simply renders it as text?

There is no generic "escape all" function in Docutils.

In many cases, simply prefixing a backslash to the text will escape it:

$ rst2pseudoxml.py <<EOF
> \v. l. a b c
>
> EOF
<document source="<stdin>">
    <paragraph>
        v. l. a b c

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