| style similar to the manual pages shown by the Unix :program:`man` command. The |
| argument to :program:`pydoc` can be the name of a function, module, or package, |
| or a dotted reference to a class, method, or function within a module or module |
| in a package. If the argument to :program:`pydoc` looks like a path (that is, |
| it contains the path separator for your operating system, such as a slash in |
| Unix), and refers to an existing Python source file, then documentation is |
| produced for that file. |
| |
n | .. note:: |
| |
| In order to find objects and their documentation, :mod:`pydoc` imports the |
| module(s) to be documented. Therefore, any code on module level will be |
| executed on that occasion. Use an ``if __name__ == '__main__':`` guard to |
| only execute code when a file is invoked as a script and not just imported. |
| |
| Specifying a :option:`-w` flag before the argument will cause HTML documentation |
| to be written out to a file in the current directory, instead of displaying text |
| on the console. |
| |
| Specifying a :option:`-k` flag before the argument will search the synopsis |
| lines of all available modules for the keyword given as the argument, again in a |
| manner similar to the Unix :program:`man` command. The synopsis line of a |
| module is the first line of its documentation string. |
| documentation pages. |
| |
| When :program:`pydoc` generates documentation, it uses the current environment |
| and path to locate modules. Thus, invoking :program:`pydoc` :option:`spam` |
| documents precisely the version of the module you would get if you started the |
| Python interpreter and typed ``import spam``. |
| |
| Module docs for core modules are assumed to reside in |
t | `<http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/>`_. This can be overridden by setting |
t | http://docs.python.org/library/. This can be overridden by setting the |
| the :envvar:`PYTHONDOCS` environment variable to a different URL or to a local |
| :envvar:`PYTHONDOCS` environment variable to a different URL or to a local |
| directory containing the Library Reference Manual pages. |
| |