[issue19980] Improve help('non-topic') response

Jessica McKellar report at bugs.python.org
Mon Apr 14 16:43:48 CEST 2014


Jessica McKellar added the comment:

Elias, thanks for your patch!

I think it's important to add the second part of Terry's suggestion which gives the user a specific next step to take, namely:

> Try help('help') for information on recognized strings or help(str) for help on the str class.

Can you add that to your patch?

Additionally, we'll want to make sure we don't accidentally break this new functionality. Can you add a few test cases, for example what happens when you run help on a module (e.g. help("os"), 2) help on an instance of a class (e.g. help(1)), and help on a string that doesn't have a special meaning, (e.g. help("abcxyz"))?

I don't see any existing tests for help(), but it is an instance of site._Helper (as reported by type(help)), and site tests live in Lib/test/test_site.py. It also gets loaded into builtins, so tests could also live in Lib/test/test_builtins.py.

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nosy: +Jessica.McKellar, jesstess

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