Sphinx: Cannot use asterisk emoji with Sphinx and without warnings?

[Peque]

Describe the bug

If I use an asterisk emoji character in my documentation (*️⃣) then Sphinx will complain with a warning:

WARNING: Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.

That is because it is interpreting the character as a separate asterisk plus something else.

To Reproduce

Add a *️⃣ character to your documentation. Example index file:

Asterisk emoji
==============

*️⃣

Expected behavior

No warnings are thrown.

Environment info

• OS: Linux (Fedora 32)
• Python version: 3.8.5
• Sphinx version: 3.2.1
• Sphinx extensions: sphinxemoji.sphinxemoji

[tk0miya]

Thank you for reporting. But this is a bug of docutils (a reST parser which Sphinx uses internally). Could you report this into docutils project?

Reproducing the error with docutils' rst2html.py:

$ cat test.rst
Asterisk emoji
==============

*️⃣
$ rst2html.py test.rst > /dev/null
test.rst:4: (WARNING/2) Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.

[Peque]

@tk0miya Sure: https://sourceforge.net/p/docutils/bugs/405/

Long time since the last time I interacted with an SVN project in SourceForge! :joy:

[tk0miya]

Good work :-)