Teach Sphinx to provide a list of modules as open data

[techtonik]

Why?

1. Solve issue #8
2. Provide info about all Python versions
3. Make data available from the web for data mining, and 3rd party services / tools
4. Provide a stable data channel for future versions

Current solution:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6463918/how-can-i-get-a-list-of-all-the-python-standard-library-modules

which assumes that you need to download and parse Sphinx object inventory (https://docs.python.org/2.7/objects.inv), which is a binary file, or download and execute Python for every version and each platform (some modules are not available on some platforms).

Ideally, the Sphinx should give out the open data about stdlib structure, such as : https://docs.python.org/2.7/_data/1.0/modules.json https://docs.python.org/2.7/_data/1.0/modules.csv list all module names, sorted by name

Then you can easily load this data into web app or use it as a table for analysis. http://www.w3.org/2013/csvw/wiki/Main_Page

[techtonik]

Missed the answer that recommends to parse https://docs.python.org/2/py-modindex.html

[techtonik]

Actually, HTML markup may change in future - https://github.com/jackmaney/python-stdlib-list/issues/1

[techtonik]

Posted to sphinx-dev https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sphinx-dev/Wa_-aPAReC8