Getting the docstring from a function

I have the following function:

def my_func():
    """My docstring is both funny and informative"""
    pass

How do I get access to the docstring?

Answers:

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Method 1

Interactively, you can display it with

help(my_func)

Or from code you can retrieve it with

my_func.__doc__

Method 2

You can also use inspect.getdoc. It cleans up the __doc__ by normalizing tabs to spaces and left shifting the doc body to remove common leading spaces.

Method 3

On ipython or jupyter notebook, you can use all the above mentioned ways, but i go with

my_func?

or

?my_func

for quick summary of both method signature and docstring.

I avoid using

my_func??

(as commented by @rohan) for docstring and use it only to check the source code

Method 4

import ast
import sys
f = open(sys.argv[1], "r") #filename input
module = ast.parse(f.read())
class_definitions = [node for node in module.body if isinstance(node, ast.ClassDef)]
method_definitions = []
for class_def in class_definitions:
        print(class_def.name)
        print(ast.get_docstring(class_def))
        function_definitions = [node for node in class_def.body if isinstance(node, ast.FunctionDef)]
        for f in function_definitions:
                print('t---')
                print('t'+f.name)
                print('t---')
                print('t'+'t'.join(ast.get_docstring(f).splitlines(True)))
        print('----')

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0