title: Parsing reStructuredText into HTML
body: <p>I'm making a framework in which I let developers describe their package using reStructuredText. I want to parse that reStructuredText into HTML so I can show it in a GUI.</p>
  
  <p>I'm familiar with the excellent Sphinx, but I've never otherwise parsed reStructuredText. I imagined something like a function that takes a string of reStructuredText, and possibly several additional arguments, and returns a string of HTML.</p>
  
  <p>So I looked into Docutils, which is responsible for parsing reStructuredText. I couldn't understand at all how to find this function. Documentation on the web is spotty. Many of the functions in the <code>docutils.parsers.rst</code> module seemed to be geared toward filenames. I don't have filenames! I'm just handling strings.</p>
  
  <p>I tried creating a <code>Parser</code> and a <code>Document</code> and using the <code>parse</code> method, but I just get an error about a missing <code>.tab_width</code> setting.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know how to parse reStructuredText into HTML?</p>