[Tutor] Viewing __doc__ strings

Remco Gerlich scarblac@pino.selwerd.nl
Fri, 8 Jun 2001 16:55:14 +0200


On  0, Allan Crooks <amc1@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> wrote:
> Is there anyway to make Python display __doc__ strings without all the
> "\n" characters? I know I could manually split it and then rejoin it, but
> surely there's an easier way?

print it:

>>> len.__doc__
'len(object) -> integer\n\nReturn the number of items of a sequence or mapping.'
>>> print len.__doc__
len(object) -> integer

Return the number of items of a sequence or mapping.

Just like any other strings with \n's in them, really :)

Personally I use a little doc() function that goes like this:

def doc(x):
   print "Object:", `x`
   print
   if hasattr(x, '__doc__'):
      print "Docstring:"
      print x.__doc__
   else:
      print "No docstring."

So I can just type

>>> doc(object)

> I'm using Python 2.1 on WinNT 4, if that's of any use.

On Linux I put that function in ~/.pythonrc, but I don't know where it goes
on WinNT. There should be a file that's executed before you enter the
interpreter.

-- 
Remco Gerlich