superhelp 0.9.9

SuperHELP - Help for Humans!

https://git.nzoss.org.nz/pyGrant/superhelp

version number: 0.9.9 author: Grant Paton-Simpson

Overview

Superhelp is Help for Humans! The goal is to provide customised help for simple code snippets. Superhelp is not intended to replace the built-in Python help but to supplement it for basic Python code structures. Superhelp will also be opinionated. Help can be provided in a variety of contexts including the terminal and web browsers (perhaps as part of on-line tutorials).

Quick Start

Click the button below to open a Binder Jupyter Notebook you can play around in e.g. get advice on a line or snippet of Python

Installation

Note - Python 3.6+ only. If you have an older version of Python use the Binder Jupyter Notebook button instead (see higher up)

To install

1. Use pip e.g.

   $ pip3 install superhelp

or similar

$ python3 -m pip install superhelp

2. Or clone the repo

   $ git clone https://git.nzoss.org.nz/pyGrant/superhelp.git $ python3 setup.py install

Example Use Cases

• Charlotte is a Python beginner and wants to get advice on a five-line function she wrote to display greetings to a list of people. She learns about Python conventions for variable naming and better ways of combining strings.

• Avi wants to get advice on a named tuple. He learns how to add doc strings to individual fields.

• Zach is considering submitting some code to Stack Overflow but wants to improve it first (or possibly get ideas for a solution directly). He discovers that a list comprehension might work. He also becomes aware of dictionary comprehensions for the first time.

• Noor has written a simple Python decorator but is wanting to see if there is anything which can be improved. She learns how to use functool.wrap from an example provided.

• Al is an experienced Python developer but tends to forget things like doc strings in his functions. He learns a standard approach and starts using it more often.

Example Usage

Screenshot from HTML

Screenshot from Terminal

Notebook

Add new cell at end with content like:

%%shelp

def sorted(my_list):
    sorted_list = my_list.sort()
    return sorted_list

and run it to get advice.

The notebook has more detailed instructions at the top.

Local Installation

$ shelp -h  ## get help on usage

$ shelp --snippet "people = ['Tomas', 'Sal', 'Raj']" --displayer html --level Main
$ shelp -s "people = ['Tomas', 'Sal', 'Raj']" -d html -l Main

$ shelp --file-path my_snippet.py --displayer cli  --level Extra
$ shelp -f snippet1.txt -d cli -l Brief

$ shelp  ## to see advice on an example snippet displayed (level Extra)

TODO Options

1. Extend advice further to encourage sound practice

2. Perhaps add style linting as an option

3. Extend beyond standard library into popular libraries like requests, bottle, flask etc.