Is there a Spinx option to prevent parsing of URL's globally?

Question

related to: How do I prevent sphinx from making a url a hyperlink?

In the question above we learn how to escape individual URL's in reStructured Text to prevent Sphinx from turning them into hyperlinks when converting to HTML. However I have a lot of URL's and I would like to keep my .rst files as clean as possible. It is an API documentation, so adding backslashes or quotes makes it less readable. Is there a config option to prevent Sphinx from parsing URL's altogether?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy way. Implicitly detecting URIs happens at the reST-parsing layer:

https://github.com/qsnake/docutils/blob/68af50cccd2c8bb88264bffad44faa8e47e5d7dc/docutils/parsers/rst/states.py#L627

Sphinx is a set of predefined domains & related tooling on top of docutils' reST implementation, so this is lower-level than the things it provides config options for.

There might be some way of getting the HTML writer to not emit <a> tags out the output side of things, but my guess is that even if it's possible, it's likely to be pretty involved.