How would I pretty print a python docstring?

Question

I have a python file that has raw strings as the docstrings.

def a():
    '\n\tthis\n\tis\n\tthe docstring.\n\t'
    print 'hello world'

how would I rewrite the docstring to look like

def a():
    """
    this
    is
    the docstring.
    """
    print 'hello world'

Answer 1

Here's an example using the inspect.getsoucelines and some regex:

import inspect
import re

def update_doc(func, indent='    '):
    sourcelines = inspect.getsourcelines(func)[0]
    doc = func.__doc__
    if doc is not None:
        ind = [line.decode('string_escape').strip()[1:-1] 
                                                 for line in sourcelines].index(doc)
        sourcelines[ind] = '{}"""{}"""\n'.format(indent, 
                                           re.sub(r'\n([ \t]+)', r'\n'+indent, doc))
    return ''.join(sourcelines)

Demo:

def a():
    '\n\tthis\n\tis\n\tthe docstring.\n\t'
    print 'hello world'
print update_doc(a)

def b():
    '\n    This is\n    not so lengthy\n    docstring\n    '
    print 'hmm...'
print update_doc(b)

Output:

def a():
    """
    this
    is
    the docstring.
    """
    print 'hello world'

def b():
    """
    This is
    not so lengthy
    docstring
    """
    print 'hmm...'

P.S: I have not tested it thoroughly yet, but this should get you started.

Answer 2

Pyment allows to create, harmonize and convert docstrings.

It can't currently propose to expand raw description as \n, but it could be easy to add this functionality. You can open an issue to request it.