feedback on function introspection in argparse

Yuv ubershmekel at gmail.com
Sat Nov 7 18:44:33 EST 2009


On Nov 8, 1:33 am, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is the docstring expected to be formatted according to some
> convention?

Yes it does, we parse the docstring as explained in argparse.py:
def _parse_docstring(function):
    """Parses a function's docstring for a description of the function
and for
    help on the individual parameters.

    The parsing algorithm currently looks for lines that start with a
parameter
    name immediately followed by any amount of whitespace, hyphens or
colons.
    The rest of the line following the colon/hyphen/whitespace is the
help.

    Keyword Arguments:
        function - the function whose docstring is parsed.

    Returns a (description, help_dict) tuple:
        description - all text before the first documented parameter
        help_dict - a dictionary mapping parameter names to their help
strings
    """

We tried to comply to PEP 257 and we're open to suggestions on this.

--yuv



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