Question

I’m trying to write a documentation for my project in Sphinx and whenever Sphinx encounters OptionParser in my module it gives me:

sphinx-build: error: no such option: -b

I thought that it’s impossible, so I wrote a simple module to check this:

from optparse import OptionParser

"""some comment here"""

parser = OptionParser(conflict_handler='resolve')
parser.add_option('', '--force', action='store_true', dest='force', default=False, help='gqdel will skip asking questions, and delete them all.');
parser.add_option('', '--verbose', action='store_true', dest='verbose', default=False, help='Report additional information from gqdel')

(options, args) = parser.parse_args()

"""and here"""

print "foo"

And it gives me the same error. My rst looks like this:

some title
==========

.. automodule:: test
   :members:

Answer 1

Here is what I think happens:

When Sphinx runs, autodoc imports your module and the toplevel code in the module is executed. An OptionParser instance is created, and it processes the command line arguments and options passed to sphinx-build, one of which is -b. Your OptionParser does not allow this option.

I would put the OptionParser code in a function so that it is not executed when the module is imported.