pystubgen

Generates Python source code from a module for documentation purposes.

When supplied with a module, it will extract all classes, functions and variables from the file and output a valid Python script with just documentation strings preserved. (Implementation detail: properties are also available).

Usage

The API to produce code is pretty straightforward:

import pystubgen

# Produce the source code str with structure and documentation
# for the 'pystubgen' module
source = pystubgen.make_source(pystubgen)
print(source)

The same functionality via the command-line interface (subject to change):

pystubgen pystubgen

The original motivation behind pystubgen was the ability to produce documentation from gdb's Python interface. An example session where gdb.py is created using pystubgen from the current directory:

pystubgen$ PYTHONPATH=$PWD gdb -q
(gdb) python
>import pystubgen
>open('gdb.py', 'w').write(pystubgen.make_source(gdb))
>end
(gdb) quit

Features

Definitions and docstrings are outputted for:

• Modules.
• Classes.
• Methods, static methods and class methods for classes.
• Fields for classes (without docstrings though).
• Global variables (without docstrings though).
• Functions and lambda functions including parameters (caveat: built-ins and other C functions have (__unknown_params__) as parameter signature).

Testing

pystubgen uses the pytest framework for acceptance testing. Once installed, you can invoke py.test to run the tests using your current python interpreter.

To test with multiple Python interpreters, install tox and invoke tox. pystubgen has been tested with Python 2.6.9, 2.7.9, 3.2.6 and 3.4.3 and pytest 2.7.0 on Arch Linux.

License

This project ("pystubgen") is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more details.