Field Lists

As previously discussed, field lists are sequences of fields marked up like this:

:fieldname: Field content

Sphinx extends standard docutils behavior for field lists and adds some extra functionality that is covered in this section.

Note

The values of field lists will be parsed as strings. You cannot use Python collections such as lists or dictionaries.

File-wide metadata

A field list near the top of a file is normally parsed by docutils as the docinfo and shown on the page. However, in Sphinx, a field list preceding any other markup is moved from the docinfo to the Sphinx environment as document metadata, and is not displayed in the output.

Note

A field list appearing after the document title will be part of the docinfo as normal and will be displayed in the output.

Special metadata fields

Sphinx provides custom behavior for bibliographic fields compared to docutils.

At the moment, these metadata fields are recognized:

tocdepth

The maximum depth for a table of contents of this file.

:tocdepth: 2

Note

This metadata effects to the depth of local toctree. But it does not effect to the depth of global toctree. So this would not be change the sidebar of some themes which uses global one.

New in version 0.4.

nocomments

If set, the web application won’t display a comment form for a page generated from this source file.

:nocomments:
orphan

If set, warnings about this file not being included in any toctree will be suppressed.

:orphan:

New in version 1.0.

nosearch

If set, full text search for this file is disabled.

:nosearch:

Note

object search is still available even if nosearch option is set.

New in version 3.0.