How to print Docstring of python function from inside the function itself?

Question

I want to print the docstring of a python function from inside the function itself. for eg.

def my_function(self):
  \"\"\"Doc string for my function.\"\"\"
         


        

Answer 1

There's quite a simple method for doing this that nobody has mentioned yet:

import inspect

def func():
    """Doc string"""
    print inspect.getdoc(func)

And this does what you want.

There's nothing fancy going on here. All that's happening is that by doing func.__doc__ in a function defers attribute resolution long enough to have looking up __doc__ on it work as you'd expect.

I use this with docopt for console script entry points.

Answer 2

You've posed your question like a class method rather than a function. Namespaces are important here. For a function, print my_function.__doc__ is fine, as my_function is in the global namespace.

For a class method, then print self.my_method.__doc__ would be the way to go.

If you don't want to specify the name of the method, but rather pass a variable to it, you can use the built-in functions hasattr(object,attribute) and getattr(obj,attr), which do as they say, allowing you to pass variables in with strings being the name of a method. e.g.

class MyClass:
    def fn(self):
        """A docstring"""
        print self.fn.__doc__ 

def print_docstrings(object):
   for method in dir( object ):
       if method[:2] == '__':  # A protected function
           continue
       meth = getattr( object, method )
       if hasattr( meth , '__doc__' ):
           print getattr( meth , '__doc__' )

x = MyClass()
print_docstrings( x )