gh-120541: Improve the "less" prompt in pydoc (GH-120543)

When help() is called with non-string argument, use __qualname__ or
__name__ if available, otherwise use "{typename} object".

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Lib/pydoc.py b/Lib/pydoc.py
index be5cd9a..768c3dc 100644
--- a/Lib/pydoc.py
+++ b/Lib/pydoc.py
@@ -1755,7 +1755,14 @@ def doc(thing, title='Python Library Documentation: %s', forceload=0,
     """Display text documentation, given an object or a path to an object."""
     if output is None:
         try:
-            what = thing if isinstance(thing, str) else type(thing).__name__
+            if isinstance(thing, str):
+                what = thing
+            else:
+                what = getattr(thing, '__qualname__', None)
+                if not isinstance(what, str):
+                    what = getattr(thing, '__name__', None)
+                    if not isinstance(what, str):
+                        what = type(thing).__name__ + ' object'
             pager(render_doc(thing, title, forceload), f'Help on {what!s}')
         except ImportError as exc:
             if is_cli: