How to enable math in sphinx?

Question

I am using sphinx with the pngmath extension to document my code that has a lot of mathematical expressions. Doing that in a *.rst file is working just fine.

a \times b becomes:

---

---

However, if I try the same inside a *.py file for example in a module documentation like so:

"""
a \times b
"""

I end up with

---

---

Furthermore no amsmath functionality seems to work, either.
What do I need to do, to also have math formulas in my *.py documentations?

Answer 1

Try putting a lower case 'r' before your docstring - like this:

def multiply(a,b):
    r"""
    returns a \times b
    """
    return a*b

I've never seen a raw literal string for a docstring before, but this will keep your \t from being interpreted as a <TAB> character.