Finding Python help...

[Neal Norwitz]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003 07:14:07 -0500, Steve Cassidy wrote:

> One problem I'm having learning (and teaching) Python is finding help on
>   some parts of the language. I'm wondering if I'm just looking the
> wrong way...

After you learn, it would be great to get patches to correct
your perceived problems.

> Eg. I wanted to find out how to get print to leave off the trailing
> newline. help(print) doesn't tell me:
> 
>  >>> help(print)
>    File "<stdin>", line 1
>      help(print)
>               ^
> SyntaxError: invalid syntax

>>> help()
# now you are in pydoc and can enter keywords such as print, etc.
help> print

> of course, print is a keyword and not a function (which by the way I
> find odd but there you are...). I found the answer eventually in the
> language definition manual but it wasn't obvious. Where should I look?

Where did you expect it to be?  Can you recommend specific changes?

> Another problem, how do I find out what methods are defined on a type
> like list? Again,  I end up in the tutorial trying to find relevant
> docs.

>>> dir([])

Don't forget about docstrings too:

>>> print [].__doc__
list() -> new list
list(sequence) -> new list initialized from sequence's items
>>> print [].append.__doc__
L.append(object) -- append object to end


Neal