Brian van den Broek wrote:
Kent Johnson said unto the world upon 2005-04-16 16:41:
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.Brian van den Broek wrote:
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?
I'm not sure what you mean by "the results list in the TKinter interface to the pydoc server". I ran the server, clicked "open browser" and browsed to a module in site-packages; that worked fine for me under Win2K and Python 2.4.1.
Kent
By "the TKinter interface to the pydoc server" I mean the window that pops up when you select the Module Docs shortcut. It is pictured here <http://www.onlamp.com/python/2001/04/18/graphics/pydoc1.gif>, which is Fig.1 in an article on pydoc by Cameron Laird <http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/04/18/pydoc.html>. By "results list" I mean the gray-backround'ed box immediately below the "Search for" input box in the illustration.
The puzzle for me was that if I enter my module name in the "Search for" box, it shows up in the list of results, as expected. But whether the results list entry for my module incorporates the description form my module's docstring or instead shows my module as having "(no description)" is a function of which style of triple quotes I used. (If my module docstring is enclosed by triple double quotes, the description is extracted from my module's docstring. If it uses triple single quotes instead, for purposes of the results list my module's docstring is ignored, and the module is listed as having "(no description)".)
At any rate, such was the (minor) irritation which caused me to launch the thread. It took me a bit to work out that the quote-style was what made the difference, and a preliminary google didn't cast light. 2/3rd's the point of the post was to make the problem resolvable by google.
Thanks for your continued efforts to understand what I'm on about. :-)
Best to all,
Brian vdB
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