Re: docutils.nodes.Node's source and line attributes

---- On Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:58:45 +0100 David Goodger<[email protected]> wrote ---- 

 > On 6 January 2014 07:50, Brecht Machiels <[email protected]> wrote: 
 > > Hello, 
 > > 
 > > I'm using reStructuredText as an input format for RinohType [1]. Since I want to provide useful warning/error messages, I rely on the source, tagname and line attributes of the Node instances to point the user to the relevant location in the source file. 
 > > 
 > > I have noticed that not all Node instances have non-None source and/or line attributes. For example, the following nodes (among others) in the quickstart.txt [2] have missing data: 
 > > * literal_block at line 119: document is None 
 > > * enumerated_list at line 143: both document and line are None 
 > > * bullet_list at line 179: both document and line are None 
 > > * literal_block at line 193: document is None 
 > > * literal_block at line 236: document is None 
 > > 
 > > Some other literal_block nodes do have document set though. 
 > > 
 > > Is this normal behavior? 
 >  
 > Those attributes were originally meant for development and debugging 
 > purposes. They are not guaranteed to be present on all elements, 
 > although it would be nice if they were. You may consider it a bug. 
 > Feel free to submit a bug report. Patches are welcome. 

I have created a new ticket to track this bug: https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/bugs/245/
As this is a fairly important feature for RinohType, I will probably get around to fixing this sometime soon.

I've had a quick look at the docutils code. It seems that the source and line attributes are set in the different methods corresponding to the different rST elements (states.py). I think it would be better to set these attributes at a higher lever, independent of the rST element type. However, I'm not sure where this should be implemented.

Best regards,
Brecht


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