naive doc question

[Gabriel B.]

Is it just me that can't find a full reference in the docs?

I wanted a list of all the methods of dict for example... where can i find it?

Thanks, and sorry if this question is just dumb, i really can't find it

[Michael Tobis]

I wouldn't call the responses here helpful; they seem overspecific. I
had a similar problem which led to the follwing code. After I came up
with this I saw a very similar utility was derived in Dive into Python.
see
http://diveintopython.org/power_of_i...ihelper.divein

Anyway the following is intended as an interactive utility to explore
the callables of modules and classes. I always have it imported into my
interactive sessions.

So import it and try

sm(dict)

..################################################ ########
..# sm()
..# showmethods
..
..def sm(namespace,terse=0,maxchars=300):
..
.. """report the callables of a namespace
..
..returns a nice string representation of the public callables of the
..namespace and the first maxchars bytes of their respective docstrings
..
..if terse, truncates the docstring at the first newline
.. """
..
.. d = namespace.__dict__
.. l = [str(x) + "\t\t" + str(d[x].__doc__)[:maxchars] for x in
d.keys() \
.. if callable(d[x]) and not x.startswith("_")]
.. if terse:
.. l = [x.split("\n")[0] for x in l]
.. l.sort()
.. return "\n=====\n".join(l)

[Duncan Booth]

Gabriel B. wrote:

Is it just me that can't find a full reference in the docs?

I wanted a list of all the methods of dict for example... where can i
find it?

Thanks, and sorry if this question is just dumb, i really can't find
it

If you want to find out about all the methods of dict then try:

lib\pydoc.py dict

from a shell prompt, or

help(dict)

from the interactive interpreter.

The catch is that many of the methods that will be shown aren't really
relevant to dictionaries, so you will need to ignore the irrelevant ones.

Run pydoc interactively ('lib\pydoc.py -g') or as a web-server if you want
to get the output as strangely coloured html. e.g. 'lib\pydoc.py -p 8081'
then point your browser at 'http://localhost:8081/dict' for help on the
dict type. (Pick a different port number if 8081 is used on your machine.)

http://localhost:8081/__builtin__ is a good starting point to browse the
builtin types, and http://localhost:8081/ will give you an index of all the
modules installed on your system.