Converting notebooks with spaces in their names to RST gives broken images

[DavidPowell]

I am using ipython nbconvert --to rst example1.ipynb to convert my example notebooks into reStructuredText, for incorporation into my package's Sphinx documentation. This works quite well, unless the filename has a space in it. In this case, any image files from my notebooks are lost when I run Sphinx's make html.

My guess is that the problem seems is in the generated rst file, where the .. image command may need to be escaped or quoted somehow to work with spaces in the filename.

I note that a similar issue was reported and resolved for latex output in issue #3774, however the solution was specific to latex.

[ivanov]

@DavidPowell thanks for reporting this bug. Can you try out #5395 to verify that it fixes this issue?

[ellisonbg]

I have verified this fixes the issue by running rst2html.py against a notebook created with ipython nbconvert --to rst that has a figure and a space in its name. Merging. Thanks @ivanov

[DavidPowell]

I can confirm that running rst2html on the generated rst file correctly shows the images. Unfortunately incorporating the rst file into a Sphinx document still does not correctly show the images. Given that rst2html produces correct output, I assume that this would be a separate issue with Sphinx.

[ellisonbg]

Hmm, what is the error that sphinx gives?

[minrk]

sphinx doesn't copy image files from the sources tree by default, does it? I suspect the image files might just be missing from sphinx build dir.

[DavidPowell]

@ellisonbg Sphinx doesn't give any error, it just displays the image file name instead of the image file.
@minrk I think you're right, I checked doc/_build/html/_images and the image files are missing if my notebook had spaces in its name

[ellisonbg]

Here is Sphinx's take on the issue:

https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/issue/453/spaces-get-stripped-from-image-file-names

By using the urlencoded fiename we are tricking docutils to work, but
because that is not the actual filename, sphinx can't use it to move the
file into place. I think the right fix is to get docutils working with
spaces in filenames, rather that urlencoding the name. What if we double
quote the filename with spaces, does that work?

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 4:28 PM, DavidPowell notifications@github.comwrote:

@ellisonbg https://github.com/ellisonbg Sphinx doesn't give any error,
it just displays the image file name instead of the image file.
@minrk https://github.com/minrk I think you're right, I checked
doc/_build/html/_images and the image files are missing if my notebook
had spaces in its name

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/5350#issuecomment-38233379
.

Brian E. Granger
Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
bgranger@calpoly.edu and ellisonbg@gmail.com

[DavidPowell]

I just upgraded from IPython 1.2.1 to 2.0.0. Now images are broken for all filenames, not just those with spaces. The offending character is %5c (backslash), which is appearing under windows. I guess I hadn't checked this carefully previously. It does confirm @ellisonbg's suggestion that names should not be urlencoded, as this breaks sphinx's ability to move the files. Now I cannot even work around the problem by avoiding file names with spaces, so I may have to revert to 1.2.1 to build my documentation.

By the way, can someone please unclose this issue, as it really isn't fixed.