python "help" function: printing docstrings

python docstring
mathtick picture mathtick · Aug 19, 2011 · Viewed 29.8k times · Source

Is there an option to print the output of help('myfun'). The behaviour I'm seeing is that output is printed to std.out and the script waits for user input (i.e. type 'q' to continue).

There must be a setting to set this to just dump docstrings.

Alternatively, if I could just dump the docstring PLUS the "def f(args):" line that would be fine too.

Searching for "python help function" is comical. :) Maybe I'm missing some nice pydoc page somewhere out there that explains it all?

Answer

kindall picture kindall · Aug 19, 2011

To get exactly the help that's printed by help(str) into the variable strhelp:

import pydoc
strhelp = pydoc.render_doc(str, "Help on %s")

Of course you can then easily print it without paging, etc.

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