DOC: provide links to API documentation where possible

[cpcloud]

Probably good as a first PR. I'm not saying we need links to DataFrame every time it's mentioned, but the io docs could use some TLC in this direction.

[cpcloud]

For posterity, if anyone is ever interested in working on this you can link to, e.g., DataFrame by doing:

:class:`~pandas.core.frame.DataFrame`

For functions you can do e.g.

:func:`~pandas.io.html.read_html`

The :func: syntax works for methods as well but if you want to be precise about it you can do, e.g.,

:meth:`~pandas.core.frame.DataFrame.replace`

For general object and other references, see the Sphinx documentation on Python "roles".

cc @jorisvandenbossche

[jorisvandenbossche]

@y-p This is just an on-going issue to gradually make more links in our docs to the docstring pages. I think we should:

• for newly written docs try to think about this at once (eg the new sql docs do this very good)
• leave this issue open as 'good as first PR'?

And as reference for later, you can reference as they are available in the user API, so you can do:

• :class:`~pandas.DataFrame` instead of :class:`~pandas.core.frame.DataFrame`
• :func:`~pandas.read_html` instead of :func:`~pandas.io.html.read_html`
• :meth:`~pandas.DataFrame.replace` instead of :meth:`~pandas.core.frame.DataFrame.replace`

The ~ makes it display as DataFrame() instead of pandas.DataFrame()

[jreback]

@jorisvandenbossche this is in the contributing readme yes?

Ok. though "good as first PR" has become somewhat synonymous with "I can't be bothered",
not the original intent of it.

[wesm]

Let's close this in favor of more specific asks