Why doesn't response pydoc on my Python 2.7?

[Peter Otten]

Robert wrote:

> On Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 7:05:39 PM UTC-5, Robert wrote:
>> On Saturday, December 12, 2015 at 6:24:25 PM UTC-5, Erik wrote:
>> > On 12/12/15 23:08, Robert wrote:
>> > > In fact, I wanted to run the following code. When it failed, I moved
>> > > to the original question above.
>> > 
>> > How did it fail? Tell us what _did_ happen.
>> > 
>> > It works fine for me:
>> > 
>> > $ pydoc module1
>> > Help on module module1:
>> > 
>> > NAME
>> >      module1
>> > 
>> > FILE
>> >      /tmp/robert/module1.py
>> > 
>> > DATA
>> >      a = 'A'
>> >      b = 'B'
>> >      c = 'C'
>> > 
>> > 
>> > $ pydoc module2
>> > Help on module module2:
>> > 
>> > NAME
>> >      module2
>> > 
>> > FILE
>> >      /tmp/robert/module2.py
>> > 
>> > DATA
>> >      __all__ = ['a', 'b']
>> >      a = 'A'
>> >      b = 'B'
>> > 
>> > E.
>> 
>> Excuse me for the incomplete information on previous posts.
>> Here is the message when I run it on Canopy (module1.py and module2.py
>> are in the current folder):
>> 
>> Welcome to Canopy's interactive data-analysis environment!
>>  with pylab-backend set to: qt
>> Type '?' for more information.
>> 
>> In [1]: pydoc module1
>>   File "<ipython-input-1-cebe02de9045>", line 1
>>     pydoc module1
>>                 ^
>> SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>  
>> 
>> In [2]:
>> 
>> 
>> The above code snippet is from here:
>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/44834/can-someone-explain-all-in-python
>> 
>> Thanks again.
> 
> Hi,
> It turns out that Enthought does not allow pydoc as the link said:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12063718/using-help-and-pydoc-to-list-python-modules-not-working

This is completely unrelated.

>>> help("modules")

for the specific string "modules" triggers a scan for all available modules. 
For other strings like "module1" that represent a module name

>>> help("module1")

should work unless

>>> import module1

fails, too.