Optparse and help formatting?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 30 Sep 2007 07:37:10 -0500, Tim Chase wrote:

>   def format_option(self, option):
>     # The help for each option consists of two parts: 
>     #   * the opt strings and metavars
[snip]

Tim, I notice you're using lots of # lines as comments to describe the 
function. Perhaps you should consider using docstrings instead.

Pardon me if I'm telling you what you already know... 

A docstring is a string that immediately follows a class, function or 
method declaration, or at the beginning of a module:


def parrot():
    "This is a doc string."
    s = "this is not a docstring"


The advantage of docstrings is that unlike # comments, they aren't 
discarded at compile time, and can be accessed by the caller:

>>> parrot.__doc__
'This is a doc string'

This is especially useful in the interactive interpreter, where 
help(object) will grab the docstring and format it nicely on screen.



-- 
Steven.