reStructuredText

reStructuredText is a file format for textual data used primarily in the Pythoncommunity for technical documentation.

The reStructuredText (frequently abbreviated as reST) project is part of the Python programming language Docutils project of the Python Doc-SIG (Documentation Special Interest Group). The goal of the project is to create a set of tools for Python similar toJavadoc for Java or POD for Perl. Docutils can extract comments and information from Python programs, and format them into various forms of useful program documentation.^[1]

The term reStructuredText is most frequently used to refer to the reST markup format developed by the reST project. In this sense, reST is a lightweight markup language designed to be both (a) processable by documentation-processing software such as Docutils, and (b) easily readable by human programmers who are reading and writing Python source code.

reStructuredText is sometimes abbreviated as RST, ReST, or reST. This can create confusion with Representational State Transfer (REST), an unrelated technology.

 

The reStructuredText parser is a component of Docutils.