Displaying dictionary data in Sphinx documentation

Question

I have a dictionary in Python project source code which describes default configuration values. The dictionary is quite lengthy. I'd like to see dictionary in Sphinx documentation in other format besides "View source", so that people can quickly check for the default values.

Does Sphinx provide options to format dictionary-like variables for human-readable format when used with Sphinx autodoc? I am currently using .. automodule:: to dump out the whole module and I get the dictionary as one long string dump in the documentation (no newlines, pretty printing, anything), being basically unreadable.

• Does Sphinx provide tools to print out the value of individual source code variables

• Is there any pretty printing available?

Answer 1

This may not be the most elegant solution (it would be much better to write a proper directive to output a pretty-printed dictionary), but this works for now:

Add the custom exec directive given here to your Sphinx .conf file, then, in the .rst file you want to print the dictionary, do something like this:

.. exec::
    import json
    from some_module import some_dictionary
    json_obj = json.dumps(some_dictionary, sort_keys=True, indent=4)
    print '.. code-block:: JavaScript\n\n    %s\n\n' % json_obj

That will print out your dictionary in a JavaScript code block in your docs (which I find to be the best way to render dictionaries in the docs).

Answer 2

If dictionary value is not computed and human readable like this

FRUITS = {
   "Apple": "Red and Delicious",
   # note: eating too much orange make your hands orange
   "Orange": "A lot of vitamin C"
}

say you have the above dict defined in fruit.py starting from line#15

then you can do:

.. literalinclude:: ../path-to-file/fruit.py
   :language: python
   :lines: 15-
   :linenos:

and you will the Human readable value + comments etc right on doc

Answer 3

I needed an answer to this but didn't like the existing answers, so I bashed my head against the wall for a bit and came up with an imperfect but acceptable solution.

It uses pprint.pformat and generates the nodes directly, but I couldn't figure out how to generate the full markup including a cross-reference target because it would keep dying with KeyError: 'objtype' if I tried to add the outer layers, the Sphinx documentation wasn't any help, and the relevant Sphinx extensions are labyrinthine.

from importlib import import_module
from pprint import pformat
from docutils.parsers.rst import Directive
from docutils import nodes
from sphinx import addnodes

class PrettyPrintDirective(Directive):
    """Render a constant using pprint.pformat and insert into the document"""
    required_arguments = 1

    def run(self):
        module_path, member_name = self.arguments[0].rsplit('.', 1)

        member_data = getattr(import_module(module_path), member_name)
        code = pformat(member_data, 2, width=68)

        literal = nodes.literal_block(code, code)
        literal['language'] = 'python'

        return [
                addnodes.desc_name(text=member_name),
                addnodes.desc_content('', literal)
        ]


def setup(app):
    app.add_directive('pprint', PrettyPrintDirective)

Here's how I'm using it:

.. automodule:: quicktile.__main__
   :members:
   :exclude-members: XDG_CONFIG_DIR,DEFAULTS,CfgDict

----

.. pprint:: quicktile.__main__.DEFAULTS

(DEFAULTS being a dict that's used to create a configuration file with default values if none is found.)

...and here's how it looks: