Extract field list from reStructuredText

Question

Say I have the following reST input:

Some text ...

:foo: bar

Some text ...

What I would like to end up with is a dict like this:

Answer 1

Here's my ElementTree implementation:

from docutils.core import publish_doctree
from xml.etree.ElementTree import fromstring

source = """Some text ...

:foo: bar

Some text ...
"""


def gen_fields(source):
    dom = publish_doctree(source).asdom()
    tree = fromstring(dom.toxml())

    for field in tree.iter(tag='field'):
        name = next(field.iter(tag='field_name'))
        body = next(field.iter(tag='field_body'))
        yield {name.text: ''.join(body.itertext())}

Usage

>>> next(gen_fields(source))
{'foo': 'bar'}