reStructuredText Field Lists
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

:Posted: 2009-04-20 21:06
:Tags: Python

reStructuredText field lists look like this:

::

    :field1: value1
    :field2: value2
    ... etc ...

They are often used at the start of documents to specify the name of the author
and the date of the post. On this page's source code I'm using them to specify
the post tags and the posted date like this:

::

    :Posted: 2009-04-20 21:06
    :Tags: Python

Here's the code I use to convert this to HTML:

::

    from docutils import core
    from docutils.writers.html4css1 import Writer
    
    def rstify(string):
        w = Writer()
        result = core.publish_parts(string, writer=w)['html_body']
        # Strip the first and last lines
        result = '\n'.join(result.split('\n')[1:-2])
        return result

This renders correctly as an HTML table with two columns:

::

    <table class="docinfo" rules="none" frame="void">
    <col class="docinfo-name">
    <col class="docinfo-content">
    <tbody valign="top">
    <tr class="field"><th class="docinfo-name">Posted:</th><td class="field-body">2009-04-20 21:06</td>
    </tr>
    <tr class="field"><th class="docinfo-name">Tags:</th><td class="field-body">Python</a></td>
    </tr>
    </tbody>
    </table>

If the field name is more than 14 characters long though it doesn't render this
way, instead rendering the field name and the field value as separate *rows*,
even if the rest of the table is in two columns:

::

    XXX

You can fix this from the command line when running ``rst2html.py`` by
specifying ``--field_name_limit=0``. Here's a little hack to make it render the
same way in code:

::

    from docutils import core
    from docutils.writers.html4css1 import Writer, HTMLTranslator
    
    class CustomHTMLTranslator(HTMLTranslator):
        def __init__(self, *k, **p):
            HTMLTranslator.__init__(self, *k, **p)
            # Allow long field names more than 14 characters in reStructuredText field lists
            self.settings.field_name_limit = 0
            
    def rstify(string):
        w = Writer()
        w.translator_class = CustomHTMLTranslator
        result = core.publish_parts(string, writer=w)['html_body']
        # Strip the first and last lines
        result = '\n'.join(result.split('\n')[1:-2])
        return result