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 docume

Answer 1

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: