* He hasn't actually defined a docstring. Docstrings have to be string
literals, you can't do this:
"""%s does everything you could possibly want.""" % "xyz"
I've occasionally wanted something like this, and have found that
it can be done by manually assigning to __doc__ (either at the
module-level or classes) which can make some documentation bits a
little easier:
# ds.py ##############
"original docstring"
OPTIONS = {
'FOO': 'bar',
'BAZ': 'boing',
}
__doc__ = """
This is %(FOO)s and it does %(BAZ)s
""" % OPTIONS
more_code_that_uses(OPTIONS)
######################
you can then
>>> import ds
>>> help(ds)
...
and see the formatted help that makes use of the options in the
file. Being lazy, I'm all for self-updating documentation ;-)
Even weirder is assigning a repr()/str()'able class-instance as
the __doc__ for even crazier behaviors (though it looks like the
internal help() function ignores them, perhaps requiring
isinstance(__doc__, basestring) to pass)
# ds2.py ###############
class DynamicHelp:
def __init__(self, name, count=0):
self.name = name
self.count = count
def __str__(self):
self.count += 1
if self.count = 3:
return "Are you REALLY that forgetful?!"
return "%s:%i" % (self.name, self.count)
def __repr__(self):
return "<%s>" % self
class C:
"Raw C"
def __init__(self, name):
self.__doc__ = DynamicHelp(name)
where you can then do weird things like
>>> import ds2
>>> c = ds2.C("Hello")
>>> c.__doc__
<Hello:1>
>>> c.__doc__
<Hello:2>
>>> c.__doc__
Are you REALLY that forgetful?!
>>> c.__doc__
<Hello:4>
-tkc
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