Alternative ways to browse the python api

Question

Is it just me, or the python standard library documentation is extremely difficult to browse through?

• http://docs.python.org/3.1/library/index.html
• http://docs.python.org/3.1/modindex.html

Java has its brilliant Javadocs, Ruby has its helpful Ruby-Docs, only in python I cannot find a good way to navigate through the standard library documentation.

There's the Epydoc project, which looks nice, but does anyone know if it is actually being used on the standard library, so we can all go through it? If not, what are the alternatives people are using to browse python documentation.

Answer 1

you can go to here and download the chm version of Python 3.1. With that, searching through the docs should be easy.

Answer 2

I usually use the built-in pydoc, if you are on windows it should be called Module Docs if you are on linux use pydoc -p 8000 and connect through browser.

Answer 3

pydoc from the command line, help() from the interactive interpreter prompt.

Answer 4

pydoc -p 8080

The python community is semi-hostile to automatically generated documentation, especially if it's Object-Orientated. Python isn't just object-orientated (it's a multi-paradigm language), so Python developers generally prefer human-written documentation. Sometimes the functions are important, sometimes the Class structure is important.

Answer 5

I used to use the python sidebar from Edgewall a long time ago.

These days, I google for the python function (the standard docs almost always show up as the first link).If I want to browse the source of the module (useful sometimes), I use this little shell function I wrote.

epy () {
    cmd="import $1 as a ; print a.__file__.endswith('.pyc') and a.__file__[:-1] or a.__file__" 
    file=$(/usr/bin/env python -c $cmd) 
    echo $file
    emacsclient --no-wait $file
}

Answer 6

I guess I'm going to get downvoted but I find nothing wrong with the Sphinx docs and I find them way way better than the java alternative.