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Q&A Best practices for maintaining documented code examples?

ReadTheDocs (a popular system for documenting code-bases) has an interesting feature which may provide an answer to this question: literalinclude. With this directive, one can include code example...

posted 9y ago by Dave Jones‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:14:08Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16511
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Dave Jones‭ · 2019-12-08T02:14:08Z (over 4 years ago)
[ReadTheDocs](https://readthedocs.org/) (a popular system for documenting code-bases) has an interesting feature which may provide an answer to this question: [literalinclude](http://sphinx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/markup/code.html#includes).

With this directive, one can include code examples from another file within the documentation. The particularly interesting part is that a subset of lines can be extracted from the source file via the `:lines:` directive meaning that the source file could be a complete (executable, testable) example while only the snippet that is relevant to the documented section need appear in the docs.

Using this directive, it would theoretically be possible to include all examples in the documentation within the project's test suite. I can't say I've ever gone that far myself - but having run into this precise issue more than once I'm now tempted to give it a try!

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2015-03-17T19:02:16Z (about 9 years ago)
Original score: 3