Convert scipy docstrings (reST) to HTML using docutils

Question

I'm designing a filter design GUI and would like to display docstrings from Python's scipy.signal in a QTextBrowser, requiring HTML format. I think docutils should do the job for me and I tried

from docutils.core import publish_string
from scipy.signal import remez
self.txtFiltInfoBox.append(publish_string(remez.__doc__,
          writer_name='html'))

where txtFiltInfoBox is a QTextBrowser instance. However, publish_string chokes on the first heading ("Parameters") it encounters in the docstring:

docutils.utils.SystemMessage: <string>:10: (SEVERE/4) Unexpected section title.

Parameters
----------

I think the reason is that the method's whole docstring is indented, leading to an invalid reST markup. Is there an easy way to dedent the docstring or to tell publish_string to ignore a certain number of leading blanks?

The full code can be found at pyFDA project.

Answer 1

You can use textwrap.dedent to, as the docs put it:

Remove any common leading whitespace from every line in text.

For example (from a similar question on CodeReview):

>>> import textwrap
>>> print(textwrap.dedent(
        """
        Usage examples:
        Test deployment:
            $ fab [noinput] test deploy
        Staging deployment:
            $ fab [noinput] staging deploy
        Production deployment:
            $ fab [noinput] production deploy
        """
))

Usage examples:
Test deployment:
    $ fab [noinput] test deploy
Staging deployment:
    $ fab [noinput] staging deploy
Production deployment:
    $ fab [noinput] production deploy