How to obtain man page contents in Python?

Question

im running linux and i want to import some man pages to my application.

i came up with this:

p = subprocess.Popen(('man %s' % manTopic,), shell = True, stdout = subprocess.PIPE)
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
if stdout:

but its no good, man is displaying only first page and blocks my applicationon

How can i obtain man page with Python?

Answer 1

Try:

p = subprocess.Popen(('man -P cat %s' % manTopic,), shell = True)
stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
if stdout:

instead -- the "-P" option overrides the pager program used by the "man" command.

Answer 2

You can grab the whole output of a command with check_output. Furthermore, using a shell is not necessary and might even make your application vulnerable to a shell injection attack and is strongly discouraged.

import subprocess

pagename = 'man'
manpage = subprocess.check_output(['man', pagename])

Note that using man will give you output formatted for a terminal. If you want to have it formatted differently, you'll have to

• call man -w <name> to get the location of the manpage,
• probably decompress the manual page,
• feed it to groff using the -T option to select the type of output you want.

When calling groff, don't forget to load the correct macro's.

On FreeBSD I tend use groff -Tlatin1 -mandoc <file> to get text output.