Bugs item #1087216, was opened at 2004-12-17 14:22 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by rhettinger You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1087216&group_id=5470
Category: Documentation Group: Python 2.4 >Status: Closed >Resolution: Fixed Priority: 5 Submitted By: Mike Meyer (mwm) Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody) Summary: datetime module documentation missing critical detail Initial Comment: The datetime documentation - both pydoc and the manual - fail to specify the arguments used to create a date/time/datetime object. The manual implies that for date it's date(year, month, day), but that's about it. It would be nice if both could be extended to include examples. For date, say: datetime.date(2004, 12, 25) - create a date object for christmas, 2004. I can't give examples for time and datetime, because I'm not sure what the format is. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) Date: 2004-12-19 15:17 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=80475 Added slightly more informative docstrings for date, time, and datetime. See Modules/datetimemodule.c 1.76 and 1.75.2.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Raymond Hettinger (rhettinger) Date: 2004-12-17 17:28 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=80475 It looks like the docstrings could be a bit more informative: >>> print datetime.date.__doc__ Basic date type. Compare that with: >>> print collections.deque.__doc__ deque(iterable) --> deque object Build an ordered collection accessible from endpoints only. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Skip Montanaro (montanaro) Date: 2004-12-17 16:05 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=44345 Pydoc generates documentation based upon what it finds in docstrings and function signatures. It can't get at the signatures of functions written in C. In Python 2.4 pydoc generates a link to a local or online version of the docs for the subject module: NAME datetime - Fast implementation of the datetime type. FILE /Users/skip/local/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload/datetime.so MODULE DOCS http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-datetime.html CLASSES __builtin__.object date datetime ... I think that's the best that can be done short of macroizing the hell out of C extension modules to allow function signatures to be captured as attributes attached to the functions, similar to what GNU Emacs did many years ago. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we want to go down that path (take a peek at the Emacs source if you are in doubt). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Mike Meyer (mwm) Date: 2004-12-17 15:23 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=93910 You're right - I was just blind when reading the module documenation. It would still be nice if I could get that information from pydoc/help, though. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Tim Peters (tim_one) Date: 2004-12-17 14:56 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=31435 I'm not sure which docs you're looking at. I'm looking at the Python docs <wink>, like here: http://docs.python.org/lib/datetime-date.html That seems very clear to me: """ class date(year, month, day) All arguments are required. Arguments may be ints or longs, in the following ranges: MINYEAR <= year <= MAXYEAR 1 <= month <= 12 1 <= day <= number of days in the given month and year If an argument outside those ranges is given, ValueError is raised. """ There are equally precise docs for all the datetime.* classes. For example, you mentioned time: """ class time(hour[, minute[, second[, microsecond[, tzinfo]]]]) All arguments are optional. tzinfo may be None, or an instance of a tzinfo subclass. The remaining arguments may be ints or longs, in the following ranges: 0 <= hour < 24 0 <= minute < 60 0 <= second < 60 0 <= microsecond < 1000000. If an argument outside those ranges is given, ValueError is raised. All default to 0 except tzinfo, which defaults to None. """ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=105470&aid=1087216&group_id=5470 _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com