How to make "--" appear in sphinx instead of "-"

Question

I'm having a small aesthetic problem with sphinx, I want "--" to appear in the document, but it keeps coming out as "-".

Example source:

remove_user (--id|--username|--email) <user_id> <source_account>
---------------
**To remove a User (and any devices associated with them) from a specific account, the following command can be used:**

* pcli.py remove_user (--id|--username|--email) <user_id> <source_account>

How it looks:

Answer 1

Basically it's due to the html_use_smartypants option which is turned on by default (see doc). In your case you would want to turn it off.

In conf.py, find the line

#html_use_smartypants = True

And change it to

html_use_smartypants = False

EDIT:

html_use_smartypants has been deprecated and smartquotes should be used instead.