BUG: Replace Unicode zero-width-space with ".."

Author: pvanmulbregt

numpydoc/docscrape.py

@@ -251,10 +251,7 @@ def _parse_param_list(self, content):
                            r"`(?P<name>(?:~\w+\.)?[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+)`|"
                            r" (?P<name2>[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+))\s*", re.X)
 
-    if sys.version_info[0] >= 3:
-        zerowidthspace = '\u200B'
-    else:
-        zerowidthspace = '\xE2\x80\x8B'
+    empty_description = '..'
 
     def _parse_see_also(self, content):
         """
@@ -489,7 +486,7 @@ def _str_see_also(self, func_role):
                 last_had_desc = True
             else:
                 last_had_desc = False
-                out += self._str_indent([self.zerowidthspace])
+                out += self._str_indent([self.empty_description])
 
         if last_had_desc:
             out += ['']

numpydoc/tests/test_docscrape.py

@@ -332,15 +332,13 @@ def _strip_blank_lines(s):
 
 
 def line_by_line_compare(a, b):
-    if sys.version_info.major >= 3:
-        zerowidthspace = '\u200B'
-    else:
-        zerowidthspace = '\xE2\x80\x8B'
+    empty_description = '..'
+    rgx = re.compile(r"^\s+" + re.escape(empty_description) + "$")
 
-    a = textwrap.dedent(a).replace(zerowidthspace, '')
+    a = textwrap.dedent(a)
     b = textwrap.dedent(b)
-    a = [l.rstrip() for l in _strip_blank_lines(a).split('\n')]
-    b = [l.rstrip() for l in _strip_blank_lines(b).split('\n')]
+    a = [rgx.sub('', l.rstrip()) for l in _strip_blank_lines(a).split('\n')]
+    b = [rgx.sub('', l.rstrip()) for l in _strip_blank_lines(b).split('\n')]
     assert_list_equal(a, b)