[Pythonmac-SIG] silly variable evaluation question

[Joseph J. Strout]

At 12:39 PM -0800 11/27/99, Dante wrote:

>That seems pretty extravagant, is that really the only way to do
>this?

It's not extravagant, it's just embellished compared to your version, with
niceties like error trapping, looping over all contents of the module,
printing a header for each one, etc.  The correct equivalent of what you
wrote is simply:

import Res
foo = dir(Res)[0]
print foo.__doc__

I.e., the only mistake you made is trying to write "Res.foo" -- as you
noted, foo isn't defined in Res.  It's defined in the current module (where
the code above lives); the fact that it *refers* to something in another
module doesn't matter.  It's "foo" regardless of what it refers too, not
"Res.foo" just because it happens to refer to something in "Res".

>Where is the % behavior being exhibited in this documented?

It's a string operator, and documented in the library reference under "More
String Operations"
(http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/typesseq-strings.html).

>The python documentation appears to be lengthy but organized extremely
>poorly.

I think this is unfair -- I have always found it to be very easy to find
what I'm looking for.  Perhaps it just requires a few moments to
familiarize yourself with it.

Cheers,
-- Joe

P.S. The python-tutor mailing list might be better suited for questions
like these.

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           Biocomputing -- The Salk Institute |
|    joe@strout.net             http://www.strout.net              |
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