Literal block

When you need to present some code examples, a literal block can be used. Two colons are used to mark the block, which is an indented paragraph:

This is a code example

:: 
 
    >>> 1 + 1 
    2 
 
Let's continue our text 

Don't forget to add a blank line after :: and after the block otherwise, it will not be rendered.

Notice that the colon characters can be put in a text line. In that case, they will be replaced by a single colon in various rendering formats:

This is a code example: 
 
    >>> 1 + 1 
    2 
 
Let's continue our text

If you don't want to keep a single colon, you can insert a space between the example and ::. In that case, :: will be interpreted and totally removed:

Figure 3: Code samples in reST rendered as HTML

We'll take a look at links in the next section