Question

Say I have a table in reStructuredText like:

+---------------+---------------------------+
| key           | value                     |
+===============+===========================+
| short_word    | value_1                   |
+---------------+---------------------------+
| really_long_  | value 2                   |
| word_I_want_  |                           |
| to_break      |                           |
+---------------+---------------------------+

Is there any way to break the word in the bottom left cell, i.e. with a line continuation escape character or anything like that so that it still appears as a single word in the output?

In particular I’m using Sphinx to document my Python documentation and because of the trailing underscore character it’s interpreting the first line as a link target which generates an error.

Answer 1

Ok, after some experimentation it looks like the usual backslash \
line continuation character works, i.e.

+---------------+---------------------------+
| key           | value                     |
+===============+===========================+
| short_word    | value_1                   |
+---------------+---------------------------+
| really_long\  | value 2                   |
| _word_I_want\ |                           |
| _to_break     |                           |
+---------------+---------------------------+

I found that I still had to move the underscore character to the next line
otherwise the first line was still interpreted as a link target although the word in the resulting HTML table was written as a continuous word.