What is is the significance of doctest in Sphinx? Can someone help me understand its use with a simple example.
Sphinx's doctest is for testing the documentation itself. In other words, it allows for the automatic verification of the documentation's sample code. While it might also verify whether the Python code works as expected, Sphinx is unnecessary for that purpose alone (you could more easily use the standard library's doctest module).
So, a real-world scenario (one I find myself in on a regular basis) goes something like this: a new feature is nearing completion, so I write some documentation to introduce the new feature. The new docs contain one or more code samples. Before publishing the documentation, I run make doctest in my Sphinx documentation directory to verify that the code samples I've written for the audience will actually work.
What is the real world use or significance of sphinx doctest?