Alternative Python standard library reference

Posted by Ender on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ender
Published on 2010-04-12T21:21:45Z Indexed on 2010/04/12 21:43 UTC
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I love Python; I absolutely despise its official documentation. Tutorials do not count as library references, but that appears to be what they're attempting.

What I really want is the ability to find a class in the standard library and view documentation for all of its properties and methods. Actionscript, MSDN, and Java all do this just fine (although each with their odd quirks).

Where is this for python?

For example, I wanted to sort a list. mylist.sort(). Awesome. But what if I wanted it sorted in descending order? Official documentation is not - much - help. Or what if I wanted to specify a key function? That's also supported: mylist.sort(key=lamba item: item.customVar)- but documented...where?

I understand that Python's approach to OOP may not be equivalent to Java et. al. Maybe list isn't actually a class - maybe it's just a function that returns an iterable when the tachyon beams are set to glorious and the unboxed hyper enumeration is quantized, but...I don't care. I just want to know how to sort lists.

(Apologies for the angst - too much caffeine today)

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