Headings¶

There are 6 levels of headings in both, Markdown and reStructuredText.

Headings in reStructuredText¶

Headings in Sphinx, when using reStructuredText, are created by underlining the section title with a punctuation character, at least as long as the text.

The underlining character can be any so long as the author of the document keeps a consistent selection, as the structure is determined from the succession itself.

This is the convention used in the Python Developer’s Guide for the underlining characters:

Use # to underline 1st level headers.
Use * to underline 2nd level headers.
Use = to underline 3rd level headers.
Use - to underline 4th level headers.
Use ^ to underline 5th level headers.
Use " to underline 6th level headers.

Headings
########

Headings in Sphinx, when using reStructuredText, ...

Headings in Markdown¶

In Markdown the headers are given by prepending the title with a number of # characters. The character # is called hash (journalists often say hash tag, most probably due to the influence of Twitter).

In Markdown headers would be prepended by a number of # characters depending on the level of the header:

# in a 1st level header.
## in a 2nd level header.
### in a 3rd level header.
#### in a 4th level header.
##### in a 5th level header.
###### in a 6th level header.

In Markdown headers can optionally be suffixed too, with the same number of # characters they have been prefixed:

# Headings #

Headings in Sphinx, when using reStructuredText, ...

Title at 2nd level¶

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Title at 3rd level with `code`¶

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Title at 4th level¶

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Title at 5th level¶

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`5th-level as code`¶