Invalid help message inside interactive help utility

Open
#94,466 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
cli, documentation

Research direction

Start at the interactive help utility through the help() entry point and reproduce help> help(help), comparing it with >>> help(help). Done means the help prompt gives a useful context-aware diagnostic instead of reporting that no documentation was found; the issue does not name a file or test to run.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

stdlib topic-repl

Documentation

From REPL, >>> help(help) produces valid output.

From inside interactive help utility, help> help(help), produces less useful output.

I suppose I would have expected something like, "cannot use help() inside of help(), use help instead".

Here is an example.

~$ python3
Python 3.10.4 (main, Apr  2 2022, 09:04:19) [GCC 11.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> help(help)

>>> help() # works as expected

Welcome to Python 3.10's help utility!

If this is your first time using Python, you should definitely check out
the tutorial on the internet at https://docs.python.org/3.10/tutorial/.

Enter the name of any module, keyword, or topic to get help on writing
Python programs and using Python modules.  To quit this help utility and
return to the interpreter, just type "quit".

To get a list of available modules, keywords, symbols, or topics, type
"modules", "keywords", "symbols", or "topics".  Each module also comes
with a one-line summary of what it does; to list the modules whose name
or summary contain a given string such as "spam", type "modules spam".

help> help(help)
No Python documentation found for 'help(help)'.
Use help() to get the interactive help utility.
Use help(str) for help on the str class.

# typing just help works as expected
help> 
You are now leaving help and returning to the Python interpreter.
If you want to ask for help on a particular object directly from the
interpreter, you can type "help(object)".  Executing "help('string')"
has the same effect as typing a particular string at the help> prompt.
>>>
Linked PRs
  • gh-148863
Dominant language
Python
Stars
77.2k
Forks
36k
Avg merge
1d 9h
Merged PRs (30d)
558

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from python/cpython

All issues in python/cpython

Similar issues

More Python issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.