RACAD

RACAD stands for Runtime Access for Class Attribute Docstrings. This is the source code accompanying my blogpost.

You can copy this code into your own project or use it as a library.

Usage

Given a class defined as follows:

class MyClass:
    a: int = 5
    """This is the docstring of a."""

to get the attribute docstring of one attribute of a class by its name, use:

from racad import get_attribute_docstring

get_attribute_docstring(MyClass, 'a')
# Output: 'This is the docstring of a.'

alternatively, to get all docstrings of all attributes of a class, use:

from racad import get_attribute_docstrings


get_attribute_docstrings(MyClass)
# Output: {'a': 'This is the docstring of a.'}

Inheritance

If you want to also search the base classes, set search_bases=True:

class MyChild(MyClass):
   b: str = "Hi"
   """This is the docstring for b."""

get_attribute_docstrings(MyChild, search_bases=True)
# Output: {'a': 'This is the docstring of a.', 'b': 'This is the docstring for b.'}

This also works for get_attribute_docstring.

Limitation

Requires source code access via the inspect module. E.g. does not work if the class has been defined in a REPL.