I'm fairly new to python. I know docstrings are used for documentation and I can use help() to call them. My question is, when I write my own function in a .py file with documentation, for example:
file - foo.py
def foo():
"""
foo documentation
"""
some code here
How can I print out the "foo documentation" from the terminal or interactive session? Thanks.
function_name.__doc__ is used to get the docstring of a function in python
As an example below is the docstring of commonly used range function of python
range.__doc__
'range(stop) -> list of integers\nrange(start, stop[, step]) -> list of integers\n\nReturn a list containing an arithmetic progression of integers.\nrange(i, j) returns [i, i+1, i+2, ..., j-1]; start (!) defaults to 0.\nWhen step is given, it specifies the increment (or decrement).\nFor example, range(4) returns [0, 1, 2, 3]. The end point is omitted!\nThese are exactly the valid indices for a list of 4 elements.'
In a REPL session it is possible to use help rather than accessing .__doc__ directly:
>>> def foo():
... """
... foo documentation
... """
>>> help(foo)
Help on function foo:
foo()
foo documentation
>>>
.__doc__ only returns the docstring as a raw string:
>>> foo.__doc__
'\n foo documentation\n '
>>>
