On Fri, Apr 29, 2016, at 23:23, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > Seriously, I'm thinking that a keyword argument to help might be useful: > > help(object, pager=None)
I'd call it something more generic like "output". > where: > > - pager=None gives the current behaviour; > > - pager="foo" calls out to the external program "foo"; > > - pager=callable passes the help text to callable(). > > > pager=print would do exactly what people are asking for, and you could > then > create your own wrapper to change the default: > > help = functools.partial(builtins.help, pager=print) > > > I think that would make it easier to test help(). Thoughts? For testing purposes, help could return the result of the output function, so that you can use lambda x: x to have it return the help text. More general thoughts: It might also be useful to move the pager machinery from pydoc to an independent module. It's got, among other things, a simple pager written in pure python, for use as a fallback. There's a lot of stuff that could be improved in the pager stuff, while we're at it. Probably needs a single function to handle "use external program as a pager", rather than having a bunch of logic embedded in getpager() which only works for os.environ['PAGER']. The "pager" function doesn't behave "properly" (in its intended behavior of calling the expensive getpager() once when it is first called and subsequently reusing the cached value) if a reference to it is stored elsewhere (e.g. by importing it to another module); it should store the cached pager function somewhere else rather than by replacing itself. The pure-python pager only works on unix-style ttys, an analogous function could be written for windows using msvcrt.getwch. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
