.. _parser-api:

Parser API

The docutils documentation describes__ parsers as follows:

The Parser analyzes the input document and creates a node tree
representation.

__ https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/dev/hacking.html#parsing-the-document

In Sphinx, the parser modules works as same as docutils. The parsers are registered to Sphinx by extensions using Application APIs; :meth:.Sphinx.add_source_suffix and :meth:.Sphinx.add_source_parser.

The source suffix is a mapping from file suffix to file type. For example, .rst file is mapped to 'restructuredtext' type. Sphinx uses the file type to looking for parsers from registered list. On searching, Sphinx refers to the Parser.supported attribute and picks up a parser which contains the file type in the attribute.

The users can override the source suffix mappings using :confval:source_suffix like following::

# a mapping from file suffix to file types
source_suffix = {
    '.rst': 'restructuredtext',
    '.md': 'markdown',
}

You should indicate file types your parser supports. This will allow users to configure their settings appropriately.

.. module:: sphinx.parsers

.. autoclass:: Parser :members: