What problem are you facing?

https://terraform-docs.io/how-to/include-examples/

Sometimes the example/main.tf file has a lot of boilerplate used to setup a module/resource declaration. This is required for the code, but often to verbose for a snippet for a README document.

Consider the aws instance resource. The example in the documentation looks something like this:

data "aws_ami" "ubuntu" {
  most_recent = true

  filter {
    name   = "name"
    values = ["ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-focal-20.04-amd64-server-*"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "virtualization-type"
    values = ["hvm"]
  }

  owners = ["099720109477"] # Canonical
}

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
  instance_type = "t3.micro"

  tags = {
    Name = "HelloWorld"
  }
}

This could be trimmed down for the sake of brevity

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = data.aws_ami.ubuntu.id
  instance_type = "t3.micro"

  tags = {
    Name = "HelloWorld"
  }
}

The README would remain specific whilst the example/main.tf code would maintain the complete set of boilerplate terraform.

How could terraform-docs help solve your problem?

It would be great if the include examples functionality could select a subset of lines from an example file. This might work similar to Github's select multiple lines of code feature

The .terraform-docs.yml could look something like this.

# .terraform-docs.yml
content: |-
  {{ .Header }}

  ## Example

  ```hcl
  {{ include "examples/example-1/main.tf#L10-L50" }}

where L10 is the first line and L50 is the last line to include.

{{ .Inputs }}

{{ .Outputs }}

### Alternative
You could refactor the example such that the `main.tf` only contains the snippet you would like to include in the README, but then we are forced to format our examples in unfavorable ways to make the docs work.