On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 9:54 AM, <jstnms...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Here is an *entirely typical* example: on some Unix, try > > > > % pydoc urllib >
I don't know who "kj" is, and jstnms123 seems to be basically off his rocker, so I won't try cc'ing either of them. (They also seem to misunderstand the nature of contributing to open source software, but I'll ignore that.) Hopefully I'm not duplicating someone else's response. I just stumbled on this thread. A couple things to note. One, pydoc just assembles the documentation strings for the item you asked for. Python has both inline documentation (meant to be brief, quick reference material) and long form documentation (the library and reference documentation, as well as the tutorial.) Pydoc just extracts what is available at the interpreter prompt if you execute import urllib help(urllib) That is meant to answer quick questions like, "what arguments does urllib.urlopen accept?", not, "what's the overall intent of the urllib module?". Despite its admitted brevity, note that if you ask pydoc for a module's documentation, that at the very top of its output, it also identifies the location of the source code on your system and refers you to the long form online documentation: Help on module urllib: NAME urllib - Open an arbitrary URL. FILE /opt/TWWfsw/python27/lib/python2.7/urllib.py MODULE DOCS http://docs.python.org/library/urllib DESCRIPTION ... I in no way mean to suggest that the documentation can't be improved. I'm simply pointing out that the documentation is almost certainly better than kj and jstnms123 give the authors credit for. I added that particular feature to the pydoc module over ten years ago, so I know it is highly unlikely your version of pydoc is missing this feature. Skip
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