The easy way to get one answer for buildin funcs and methods is the help function in the interactive interpreter (and Idle's and probably other imitations thereof) is, for example,
>>> help(str.join) Help on method_descriptor: join(...) S.join(sequence) -> string Return a string which is the concatenation of the strings in the sequence. The separator between elements is S. To remind how to use 'help', 'help' is more informative than 'help(help)' ;-) Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list