Brian van den Broek wrote:
Hi all,
I'm posting partly so my problem and solution might be more easily found by google, and partly out of mere curiosity.
I've just spent a frustrating bit of time figuring out why pydoc didn't extract a description from my module docstrings. Even though I had a well formed docstring (one line, followed by a blank line, followed by the rest of the docstring), when I ran Module docs, my modules showed up as having "no description". ("Module docs" referring to the shortcut installed on Windows that launches the pydoc server.)
?? It works for me with triple-single quoted strings...from a quick look it appears that pydoc uses inspect which looks at the __doc__ attribute; do your modules have __doc__ attributes?
Kent
Thanks for the reply, Kent. (Also to Thomas in another reply addressed below.)
Kent, that's odd. My module does have a valid docstring and hence a __doc__ attribute (I did explicitly check). help(my_module) works fine at the prompt. It is just the results list in the TKinter interface to the pydoc server application that doesn't seem to pick up my module's description (in the first line of its docstring) when the docstring is triple-single quoted.
Either way, it's no big deal; my post was at least as much to have a googleable record of the situation as to figure out why. That said, it still does puzzle me that the pydoc server treats the two styles of triple quoted docstrings differently on my system (Python 2.4.1, Windows Me).
Thomas suggested the preference might be related to Emacs behaviour--that is something I know little about :-)
He also suggested that it could be that pydoc is following the PEP 257 <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0257.html> recommendation to use triple-double quoting. That might be, but if that's the explanation, it just pushes the puzzle up a level for me :-)
Anyway, thanks again to both,
Brian vdB
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