Format text in a link in reStructuredText

Question

How do you format text within a denoted link in reStructuredText?

Specifically, I wish to generate the following HTML from my rst:

Answer 1

Have you tried intersphinx? Using that extension, the following markup:

:py:class:`optparse.OptionParser`

produces this HTML:

optparse.OptionParser

Tested with Python 2.6 and Sphinx 1.0.5.