Documentation of `pkgutil.walk_packages` is unclear

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the library documentation for pkgutil.walk_packages and compare the description of recursive discovery with the prefix parameter. Clarify that recursion depends on supplying the package prefix, using the reported xml examples to make the behavior and expected output clear.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

docs

Documentation

Documentation for the function pkgutil.walk_packages says:

Yields ModuleInfo for all modules recursively on path , or, if path is None , all accessible modules.

Emphasis on modules recursively mine. The function is only recursively if the correct prefix value is provided, which is not super clear from the docs:

prefix is a string to output on the front of every module name on output.

For example:

>>> import pkgutil
>>> len(list(pkgutil.walk_packages(['/usr/lib64/python3.10/xml/'])))
4
>>> len(list(pkgutil.walk_packages(['/usr/lib64/python3.10/xml/'], '')))
4
>>> len(list(pkgutil.walk_packages(['/usr/lib64/python3.10/xml/'], 'xml.')))
21
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