FAQ / Known limitations / Known issues

Known limitations

There are inherent limitations to what rstcheck-core can and cannot do. The reason for this is that rstcheck-core itself relies on external tools for parsing and error reporting. The rst source e.g. is given to docutils which then parses it and returns the errors. Therefore rstcheck-core is more like an error accumulation tool. The same goes for the source code in supported code blocks.

Known issues

Code blocks without language (Sphinx)

According to the documentation for reStructuredText over at docutils the language is an optional argument to a code block directive. In vanilla mode language-less code blocks are treated like code blocks which specified a language that is not supported by rstcheck.

When sphinx support is active however, a deeply nested issue arises in form of an AttributeError. This exception has the unpleasant side-effect that linting for the whole file containing this language-less code block fails. This may result in a false negative for the file.

There are currently only one fix available:

Explicitly specifying the language for the code block. This renders the highlight directive useless, but is the only known way to fix this issue. And it enables checks of the source code inside those code blocks, if the language is supported of cause.

This issue is tracked in issue #3.