harobed, the -SKIP solution does not work. Doctest directives only apply to a single line.

After a quick search, I found two workarounds there:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1809037/python-doctest-skip-entire-block
- Replace >>> with >>
or
- split the docstring, and add something like "__dont_test__ = " in front of the second part; the string becomes part of a statement and won't be parsed.