How to print Docstring of python function from inside the function itself?

Question

I want to print the docstring of a python function from inside the function itself. for eg.

def my_function(self):   """Doc string for my function."""   # print the Docstring here. 

At the moment I am doing this directly after my_function has been defined.

print my_function.__doc__ 

But would rather let the function do this itself.

I have tried calling print self.__doc__ print self.my_function.__doc__ and print this.__doc__ inside my_function but this did not work.

Answer 1

def my_func():     """Docstring goes here."""     print my_func.__doc__ 

This will work as long as you don't change the object bound to the name my_func.

new_func_name = my_func my_func = None  new_func_name() # doesn't print anything because my_func is None and None has no docstring 

Situations in which you'd do this are rather rare, but they do happen.

However, if you write a decorator like this:

def passmein(func):     def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):         return func(func, *args, **kwargs)     return wrapper 

Now you can do this:

@passmein def my_func(me):     print me.__doc__ 

And this will ensure that your function gets a reference to itself (similar to self) as its first argument, so it can always get the docstring of the right function. If used on a method, the usual self becomes the second argument.