On 16 August 2011 22:58, Ben Finney wrote:

Michael Foord writes:

...

How about *another* string prefix for dedented strings:

class Thing(object): d""" This text will be, nicely dedented, thank you very much. """"

class Thing(object): """ This literal string contains leading and trailing whitespace.

It also is indented. But none of that will show up when the docstring is processed and presented to the user.

Because it is a docstring that conforms to PEP 257, the indentation will be handled properly by PEP-257 conformant docstring processors.

< http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/#handling-docstring-indentation>_ gives the specification for how indentation shall be handled by code that processes Python docstrings.

The place I'm concerned about is the interactive interpreter, virtually the only place I look at docstrings that isn't directly in the source code (or pre-processed by a doc tool - but I don't care about that). Michael

The programmer inspecting the value of ‘__doc__’ will still see the leading, trailing, and indenting whitespace; but the programmer doing so isn't the recipient of the docstring as a docstring.

So I don't see what problem there is to be solved.

""" pass

-- \ “Guaranteed to work throughout its useful life.” —packaging for | `\ clockwork toy, Hong Kong | _o__) | Ben Finney

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On Tue, 2011-08-16 at 23:43 +0100, Michael Foord wrote:

The place I'm concerned about is the interactive interpreter, virtually the only place I look at docstrings that isn't directly in the source code (or pre-processed by a doc tool - but I don't care about that).

Why don't you use bpython? It shows the docstring automatically as you're typing a class, without all the methods, and properly formatted. Also if you're working with docstrings yourself there's inspect.getdoc which handles whitespace/indentation. (But I still consider your proposal useful.)

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

Unless you regularly inspect instance.__doc__ by hand (not via help), I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here.

One trick I did discover thanks to this thread: 'pydoc.pager = pydoc.plainpager' Eliminates the potentially annoying behaviour where help() takes over the entire terminal window and doesn't appear in the scrollback history. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

On 17 August 2011 13:58, Michael Foord wrote:

On 17 August 2011 04:33, Nick Coghlan wrote:

...

On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

...

Unless you regularly inspect instance.__doc__ by hand (not via help), I'm not sure what you hope to accomplish here.

One trick I did discover thanks to this thread: 'pydoc.pager = pydoc.plainpager'

Thanks Nick, that does make help substantially less annoying. I'll add it to my python startup.

Although `help(klass)` is still (often) way too verbose if I *just* want to see the class docstring (help shows all methods and their docstrings too). And as you can't modify a class docstring there's no way to fix indented text there. All the best, Michael

All the best,

Michael

...

Eliminates the potentially annoying behaviour where help() takes over the entire terminal window and doesn't appear in the scrollback history.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas

--

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/

May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others

May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html

-- http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give. -- the sqlite blessing http://www.sqlite.org/different.html