Announcing the latest version of HappyDoc, a Python documentation extraction tool. HappyDoc is a tool for extracting documentation from Python source code. It differs from other such applications by the fact that it uses the parse tree for a module to derive the information used in its output, rather that importing the module directly. This allows the user to generate documentation for modules which need special context to be imported. Version 1.4 -- - Handle Packages separately from Modules. This behavior is optional and consists mostly of creating intermediate level TOC pages and not showing subdirectories of a Package on the Package's parent TOC page. - Changed default title to include instructions about how to change the title - Show exceptions in plugins when there is a problem loading a module - Added a command line argument to support ignoring specific subdirectories. - Fixed problem with ignoring directories by correcting name comparison logic. - Change "link":URL style references which were HTML quoted back to StructuredText so that hyperlinks can be embedded within docstrings. (reported by Mihalopoulos Evangelos) - Changed base class arrangement for docset so the basic interface is documented as part of the docset base class. - Moved some formatter functions into the docset, since they match that API better and more properly belong there. - Fixed bug 131751, problem with string dereference in parseinfo.py - Set the DOCTYPE in hdformatter_htmlfile.py. (Thanks to Shannon -jj Behrens for the patch.) - Fixed problem with references to extra files when using output prefixes. - Changed test harness to use the HappyDoc class directly instead of calling out to a separate program. - Output a oneliner for referenced pre-formatted documents. - Modified parseinfo.py to improve speed - Expanded information extracted about exceptions thrown by functions - Simplified the regressino test to make it faster by removing Zope docs from the default regression test suite Download Download the latest version of HappyDoc from the home page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/happydoc Doc-string Format How does an author write documentation so that it will be marked up and look fancy? This is a perennial question for Python, and seems to have introduced a roadblock into the development of more robust and useful documentation tools. By separating the formatter classes from the docset classes, HappyDoc allows a user to create their own formatter to interpret comments in any way they see fit. The default for the HTMLTableFormatter (the default formatter for HappyDoc) is to treat __doc__ strings as StructuredText. Don't like StructuredText? Write your own formatter that does something different and drop it into place. Documentation not in Doc-strings It is not always desirable to put all documentation in __doc__ strings. Sometime, notably when working with Zope, special meaning is attached to the presence of __doc__ strings. For this reason, and to support existing code which might not have __doc__ strings, HappyDoc will find and extract documentation in Python comments. Comment documentation can contain all of the same formatting as __doc__ strings. The preceding comment marker will be stripped off and the lines will be assembled and treated as a block of StructuredText. To use this feature, it is important to place the comments **before** the named object which they describe. In this example: # # Class documentation goes here # class ClassWithNoDocStrings: "Using __doc__ strings overrides comment documentation." def method1(self, params): "This method uses a __doc__ string." pass # # Method2 does not use a __doc__ string. # def method2(self): pass The output would include the __doc__ strings for the class and for method1. It would also make it appear that method2 had a __doc__ string with the contents "Method2 does not use a __doc__ string."