docshare

Share documentation between related Python objects, without repeating yourself and without templating.

Read the documentation

What it does

docshare parses NumPy- and Google-style docstrings, lets a function inherit the parts it would otherwise duplicate, and writes the result back to __doc__ as ordinary documentation. Nothing downstream needs to know: help, your editor, and Sphinx all see a normal docstring.

The library is docshare; its decorator is docwrap, which wraps one object's documentation around another's.

from docshare import docwrap


def quuxatize(foo, bar=1):
    """A function that quuxizes the arguments `foo` and `bar`.

    Parameters
    ----------
    foo : float
        The foo parameter for the quux operation.
    bar : float, optional
        The bar parameter for the quux operation; the default is 1.
    """
    pass


@docwrap(format='numpy', inheritparams=quuxatize)
def logquuxatize(foo, bar=1, base=None):
    """Returns the log of the quux of arguments `foo` and `bar`.

    Parameters
    ----------
    base : float, optional
        The base of the log that should be used; the default is ``None``.
    """
    pass

logquuxatize now documents foo, bar and base, in signature order, and nothing in the result hints that any of it was shared.

>>> pring(logquuxatize.__doc__)
Returns the log of the quux of arguments `foo` and `bar`.

Parameters
----------
foo : float
    The foo parameter for the quux operation.
bar : float, optional
    The bar parameter for the quux operation; the default is 1.
base : float, optional
    The base of the log that should be used; the default is ``None``.

A source needs no decoration and no cooperation of any kind. It needs a docstring --- including one from a library that has never heard of docshare:

import numpy as np
from docshare import docwrap

@docwrap(format='numpy', inheritparams=(np.sum, np.log))
def total(a, axis=None, base=None):
    """Sum an array, the way we like it."""
    return np.sum(np.log(a, base=base), axis=axis)

Installation

$ pip install docshare

Python 3.10 and later. No runtime dependencies.

At a glance

• Reads and writes both NumPy and Google style, and converts between them.
• Understands the full numpydoc section set, and preserves sections it does not understand rather than discarding them.
• Inherits parameters, returns, raises, attributes and the rest, from one source or several, with renaming, exclusion and per-item binding.
• Keeps grouped declarations such as x, y : float intact.
• Checks documented parameters against the callable's signature.
• Works with functions, methods, classes, properties, static methods and class methods.
• Safe to use from several threads.

Documentation

The full documentation lives at https://noahbenson.github.io/docshare/:

• Quick start
• Guide --- every way to say what to inherit, how the two formats are read and written, signature checking, threads, and errors
• API reference
• Coming from docrep

The specification is the normative description the implementation is checked against, and docs/deferred.md records the edge cases that were considered and how each was settled.

Development

$ pip install -e '.[dev]'
$ pytest
$ ruff check . && ruff format --check .
$ make -C docs html

License

MIT. See LICENSE.