Using PyDoc help
If you use docstrings appropriately, you can harness the power of PyDoc, which is a built-in Python toolset that can extract docstrings and other information and format them into easy-to-read text. While there are many other tools available, PyDoc comes with Python, so you can be sure of it being available (as long as you have access to the Python standard library).
How to do it...
- PyDoc is accessed by using the
help()
function, as seen previously. While built-in objects can have multiple pages of information, your code doesn't have to be as elaborate, unless you want it to be. Depending on the Python version being used, you don't have to import the module you want help on, but it is generally better to import it, just to make sure.
- Looking back at the preceding
random()
example, you can see that a lot of information is available viahelp()
; of course, it is all dependent on how much information the developer decides to put into the docstrings. Functionally, the output is...