help() function screen output

[Tim Golden]

On 31/01/2015 08:17, Jacob Kruger wrote:
> Using python 3.4 32 bit on windows 7 64 bit machine, and when, for
> example, type in something like the following in interpreter window:
> help(str)
> It will populate the screen with one full screen of information, with a
> prompt of --more-- to hit enter, or something to continue displaying
> information, but, when, for example, hit enter key, it merely populates
> one more line of info, each time - under pythn 2.7, it seemed to render
> one full screen of info each time.
> Is there rather a different keystroke should use to invoke that, or is
> this a python 3.4 feature/issue?

The help() function uses (by default, on Windows) the built-in 
"more.com" command. There's some hand-waving going on there because it 
can/will be overridden if you have a different "more" executable 
available before the system-provided more.com or if you have a PAGER env 
var set.

If you, at the Windows command prompt (ie *not* in Python), type:

more /?

You can see the various keystrokes which the program responds to. 
Specifically, the last two lines show:

<space> Display next page
<ret>   Display next line

which is, I suspect, what you're after here.

(If you're interested, the code for all this is in the pydoc module 
(Lib\pydoc.py) in the getpager() function.

TJG