pydoc generated help-text with file handle parameters

Question

I have a function with the following parameter list:

def print(*line, sep=' ', end='\n', file=sys.stdout, default = 'full'):

Unfortunately the pydoc help text for the module shows it like this:

FUNCTIONS
print(*line, sep=' ', end='\n', file=<_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdout>' mode='w' encoding='cp850'>, default='full')

How can I make pydoc give the file argument as file=sys.stdout rather than showing the gory details of the object?

Python 3.2, by the way.

Fred Foo · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-14 11:26:16Z

1

Easy solution:

def print(*line, sep=' ', end='\n', file=None, default = 'full'):
    '''If file is None, defaults to sys.stdout.'''

    if file is None:
        file = sys.stdout

(But please consider not using print and file as identifiers. print esp. will break Python 2-compatibility forever.)

answered Sep 14, 2011 at 11:26

Fred Foo

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1 Comment

cdarke Over a year ago

That works, thanks. It does seem rather a pain to have to change one's code just to get readable help text. I looked in the pydoc module and found how it was getting information for functions, and I can't see a simple way around it (other than altering my code). By the way the project is Python 3 only. Thanks for the advice, but I'm not concerned about backward compatibility. This is only a small part of the code, there's no way the rest will ever work on Py2 anyway.

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