Sphinx and reStructuredText: multiple code highlighting in a single block

Question

I am new to Sphinx. I am writing some documentation for embedded UDFs that requires a code block to contain 2 languages (e.g. SQL and python). At present I can only see how to have a single highlight language in a block.

Is it possible to "switch" languages within a block? Below is an example of reStructuredText that results in 3 code block that I want to merge into one. Simply removing the second and third "::" doesn't work.

.. highlight:: sql
::

    SELECT * FROM
    EXTERNAL SCRIPT(

.. highlight:: R
::

    #Some R markup
    MEANS = matrix(runif(nclust*ndim)*sqrt(nclust)*sep, nrow = nclust)
    VARS = matrix(runif(nclust)*ndim, nrow = nclust)
    ps = 1:nclust
    ps = ps/sum(ps)

.. highlight:: sql
::

    )
    FROM myshema.mySQLtable

Answer 1

I am 99% sure that this cannot be done by default, and your solution of using separate 'highlight' blocks is the standard procedure to show multiple languages.

I believe that this is for the best anyway as mixing code in one block is usually a bad idea as it can confuse readers.

Also, when converting reStructuredText into HTML for example, a style sheet is used to make everything look pretty, and a default style sheet is included. If you do some research, I'm sure you could edit that style sheet or make your own, perhaps making the 'border' invisible and the 'margin-bottom' zero pixels for 'highlight' blocks.

Answer 2

You can try this extension to have different languages in tabs:

https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx-contrib/src/c30b46a0a1b5c21ec9977e6abc598d0654316ac2/examplecode/?at=default