Mike F Miller wrote:

I'm currently working on writing a medium sized tool that needs good embedded documentation, both for producing 'external' documents and for producing `-help` docs. I'd like to use the same string for both and have it formatted decently. For example, I'm thinking that having the ability to do something like...

if __name__ == '__main__': """ This program runs a mpv test. The following options are available: (list the options, blah, blah, link, blah) """ help_re = re.compile("\-h(elp)?") for arg in sys.argv[1:]: if help_re.match(sys.argv[i]): print prettyparser(__doc__) # might be wrong syntax...

This would work if you'd put the above code into a main() function.

Would be a really good thing. Of course this implies a python prettyparser module of some kind. I was thinking that something like it might exist to parse the structured text format, or will eventually need to exist to support the SIGs goals...

Any thoughts or comments? Am I nuts, or should I try and write a structured text reformatter? Or a html->txt converter and use html instead?

There are many tools out there: gendoc, doc.py (see my Python Pages) py2html.py (dito), py2pdf.py, etc... A nice introspection tool is Ping's inspect.py (I think it was called). As for text formatting, you could use some of the APIs available in hack.py (PPs). -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Business: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/