[SciPy-user] Docstring standards for NumPy and SciPy

[Fernando Perez]

On 1/11/07, Brian Granger <ellisonbg.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Any reason ipython can't use epydoc or some other tool to format the
> > markup in ascii (I forget if epydoc does ascii output) so that the
> > user doesn't see the 'line noise' when using the ipython
> > introspection features?
>
> This would be really nice and address the line noise issue - at least
> within ipython.  I'm sure it could be done as epydoc just uses
> docutils to parse the docstrings.  I don't know much about the
> docutils internals, but I am assuming you could access the document
> tree of the doc string and then print things however you want.  This
> would be rather cool and could be done dynamically on the fly.
>
> Thoughts Fernando?

+1, and super-easy to implement.  The place to look is:

http://projects.scipy.org/ipython/ipython/browser/ipython/trunk/IPython/OInspect.py

The getdoc function is the single point of entry for docstring
extraction, it's just a matter of enhancing it to use docutils if
present (but revert gracefully to normal operation if not).

Cheers,

f