Adding docstrings to namedtuples?

Question

Is it possible to add a documentation string to a namedtuple in an easy manner?

I tried

from collections import namedtuple  Point = namedtuple("Point", ["x", "y"]) """ A point in 2D space """  # Yet another test  """ A(nother) point in 2D space """ Point2 = namedtuple("Point2", ["x", "y"])  print Point.__doc__ # -> "Point(x, y)" print Point2.__doc__ # -> "Point2(x, y)" 

but that doesn't cut it. Is it possible to do in some other way?

Answer 1

In Python 3, no wrapper is needed, as the __doc__ attributes of types is writable.

from collections import namedtuple  Point = namedtuple('Point', 'x y') Point.__doc__ = '''\ A 2-dimensional coordinate  x - the abscissa y - the ordinate''' 

This closely corresponds to a standard class definition, where the docstring follows the header.

class Point():     '''A 2-dimensional coordinate      x - the abscissa     y - the ordinate'''     <class code> 

This does not work in Python 2.

AttributeError: attribute '__doc__' of 'type' objects is not writable.

Answer 2

Came across this old question via Google while wondering the same thing.

Just wanted to point out that you can tidy it up even more by calling namedtuple() right from the class declaration:

from collections import namedtuple  class Point(namedtuple('Point', 'x y')):     """Here is the docstring."""