Format text in a link in reStructuredText

This construct:

Here you have |optparse.OptionParser|_.

.. |optparse.OptionParser| replace:: ``optparse.OptionParser`` documentation
.. _optparse.OptionParser: http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html

produces this HTML (some linebreaks added):

<p>Here you have 
  <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.python.org/library/optparse.html">
  <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">optparse.OptionParser</span></tt> documentation</a>.
</p>

I realize that this is not exactly what you asked for, but maybe it's close enough. See also http://docutils.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html#is-nested-inline-markup-possible.

Have you tried intersphinx? Using that extension, the following markup:

:py:class:`optparse.OptionParser`

produces this HTML:

<a class="reference external" href="http://docs.python.org/2.6/library/optparse.html#optparse.OptionParser" title="(in Python v2.6)"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">optparse.OptionParser</span></tt></a>

Tested with Python 2.6 and Sphinx 1.0.5.

Taking from the same FAQ page referenced by mzjn:

The "raw" directive can be used to insert raw HTML into HTML output:

Here is some |stuff|.

.. |stuff| raw:: html

   <em>emphasized text containing a
   <a href="http://example.org">hyperlink</a> and
   <tt>inline literals</tt></em>

It should in theory be possible to do complicated things with that that can't be done with RST.