Unclear error messages when sections are not separated with white lines

[jsh9]

Unclear error messages when sections are not separated with white lines

[erwann-met]

Related issue on ruff: astral-sh/ruff#5442

[jsh9]

Thanks for reporting this! Very interesting case.

The root cause is: pydoclint uses numpydoc, the official numpy docstring library, to parse numpy-style docstrings. Without the blank line before Returns, the parser thinks that there isn't a return section, and -------- and Returns: are actually input arguments.

Please note that the use of numpydoc in pydoclint is probably one of the reason that it's much faster than darglint. (I think darglint's author implemented a custom docstring parser.)

It's probably not feasible for pydoclint to "hack into" numpydoc's internal code.

Do you have suggestions of a solution?

[erwann-met]

I think that as soon as ruff rule D410 is fixed, this should not be an issue any more.
This might be out of the scope of pydoclint indeed.

[jsh9]

Closing this issue. No actions needed.

(If I closed this issue by accident, please feel free to leave a comment here.)