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CategoryDocumentation

Documentation of Python modules is most-often done by adding docstrings to your code. You can read a module's docstrings from the Python interactive prompt (the "REPL") by using the help() function. For example:

import distutils
help(distutils)

The help() function uses Python's standard pydoc module, as does the pydoc command that comes with Python.

The various documentation tools available generally do one of two things:

  • they either process docstrings in some way to make finding/reading documentation on a given module easier (so-called "API documentation tools"), or
  • they have nothing to do with docstrings and instead focus on processing documentation in some way (such as converting your plain text docs into html)

Currently, the Python docs consist of 2 parts:

  • the API docs that you can read using the help() command (pydoc can also provide these as html and even serve them from your local machine), and

  • the manuals/guides/howtos at http://python.org/doc/ which are written in reStructuredText (a plain text format) and processed into various output formats by the Sphinx tool.

When writing documentation for your own modules (either as manuals or docstrings (preferably both)), I suggest you use a plain text markup such as reST or Markdown.

Automatic Python API documentation generation tools

Other projects that can be used to produce API documentation

  • XIST - an XML based extensible HTML generator written in Python.

  • HtmlGen - a Python library for generating HTML documents.

Other documentation processing tools

  • Pandoc -- written in Haskell, this tool can read and write a number of formats (including reST).


CategoryDocumentation

DocumentationTools (last edited 2023-02-04 13:42:35 by GilOliveira)

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