docstring

Inheriting methods’ docstrings in Python

This is a variation on Paul McGuire’s DocStringInheritor metaclass. It inherits a parent member’s docstring if the child member’s docstring is empty. It inherits a parent class docstring if the child class docstring is empty. It can inherit the docstring from any class in any of the base classes’s MROs, just like regular attribute inheritance. … Read more

How to express multiple types for a single parameter or a return value in docstrings that are processed by Sphinx?

Python 3.10 | (pipe, binary or) Union type hint syntax sugar Once you get access, this will be the way to go, it is sweet: def f(i: int|str) -> int|str: if type(i) is str: return int(i) + 1 else: return str(i) The PEP: https://peps.python.org/pep-0604/ Documented at: https://docs.python.org/3.11/library/typing.html#typing.Union Union type; Union[X, Y] is equivalent to X … Read more

Using javadoc for Python documentation [closed]

Have a look at the reStructuredText (also known as “reST”) format, which is a plaintext/docstring markup format, and probably the most popular in the Python world. And you should certainly look at Sphinx, a tool to generate documentation from reStructuredText (used for eg. the Python documentation itself). Sphinx includes the possibility to extract documentation from … Read more

How do I programmatically set the docstring?

An instancemethod gets its docstring from its __func__. Change the docstring of __func__ instead. (The __doc__ attribute of functions are writeable.) >>> class Foo(object): … def bar(self): … pass … >>> Foo.bar.__func__.__doc__ = “A super docstring” >>> help(Foo.bar) Help on method bar in module __main__: bar(self) unbound __main__.Foo method A super docstring >>> foo = … Read more

Python decorator handling docstrings

Use functools.wraps() to update the attributes of the decorator: from functools import wraps def decorator(f): @wraps(f) def _decorator(): print ‘decorator active’ f() return _decorator @decorator def foo(): ”’the magic foo function”’ print ‘this is function foo’ help(foo) Also see the Standard Library documentation for functools.