python doc for docstring

Question

I want to have a tool which can generate documentation from the source code comments, I found a tool named pythondoc, it can generate HTML or XML from python source codes, but it doesn't support extracting the docstring, only supports extrats the '#'comments, is there a tool which can support the docstring extracting?

Answer 1

You can easily scan all your files and folders, find all python files, and get only docstrings out of them with some regex matching, something like this:

import re
import os
import xmlutils # download it from: https://gist.github.com/huseyinyilmaz/1448723

my_dir = '<absolute path to my dir>'

doc_dict = dict()

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(my_dir):
    for filename in files:
        if filename.endswith('.py'):
            with open(os.path.join(root, filename), 'r') as py_file:
                basename = os.path.basename(filename)
                doc_dict[basename] = [m.group('doc') for m in re.finditer(
                    re.compile(r'("|\'){3}(?P<doc>.*?)\1{3}', re.DOTALL),
                    py_file.read()
                )]

dict2xml(dict(root=doc_dict))