In Python 3, the default encoding of source files is utf-8. The encoding
cookie is now unnecessary and redundant so remove it. For more details,
see the docs:
https://docs.python.org/3/howto/unicode.html#the-string-type
> The default encoding for Python source code is UTF-8, so you can
> simply include a Unicode character in a string literal ...
Includes a fix for the flake8 header checks to stop expecting an
encoding cookie.
In the Python 3 only code base, this function is no longer necessary.
The type of values is well understood and deliberate. Code should avoid
arbitrary mixing of bytes & str.
By removing force_decode() calls from docstring values, can deprecate
the now unused 'encoding' arguments to various autodoc methods.
As the previous commit explains, it is now possible to specify arguments
to the global options in config files. This means that we can now include
the `exclude-members` option in this global configuration.
Previously, there was no point including this option because it makes no
sense without arguments. Including this option means users have the
flexibility of explicitly including which special methods they want using
(e.g.):
:special-members: __init__, __iter__
or explicitly excluding which special-members (or other members) they want
using (e.g.):
:exclude-members: __weakref__, __hash__
Previously, users could specify a *list* of flags in their config files.
The flags were directive names that would otherwise be present in the
.rst files. However, as a list, it was not possible to specify values
to those flags, which *is* possible in .rst files.
For example, in .rst you could say
:special-members: __init__, __iter__
And this would cause autodoc to generate documents for these methods that
it would otherwise ignore.
This commit changes the config option to instead accept a dictionary.
This is a dictionary whose keys can contain the same flag-names as before,
but whose values can contain the arguments as seen in .rst files.
The old list is still supported, for backwards compatibility, but the data
is transformed into a dictionary when the user's config is loaded.
Setting mutable types as default arguments is bad practice because the
value is only initialised once. This means that defaults arguments of
lists and dictionaries which are modified during code execution *stay*
modified between calls.
In this case, the `options` dictionary accumulated options as more and
more test cases were executed. Without this change, the tests added in
the next commit do not pass.
See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1132941/least-astonishment-and-the-mutable-default-argument
