From 1ffbfbc5666cc304ca00c6da297431e9d2aee6a1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Georg Brandl Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:11:15 +0000 Subject: #4671: document that pydoc imports modules. --- Doc/library/pydoc.rst | 7 +++++++ 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+) diff --git a/Doc/library/pydoc.rst b/Doc/library/pydoc.rst index 6d4986e..3784515 100644 --- a/Doc/library/pydoc.rst +++ b/Doc/library/pydoc.rst @@ -36,6 +36,13 @@ it contains the path separator for your operating system, such as a slash in Unix), and refers to an existing Python source file, then documentation is produced for that file. +.. note:: + + In order to find objects and their documentation, :mod:`pydoc` imports the + module(s) to be documented. Therefore, any code on module level will be + executed on that occasion. Use an ``if __name__ == '__main__':`` guard to + only execute code when a file is invoked as a script and not just imported. + Specifying a :option:`-w` flag before the argument will cause HTML documentation to be written out to a file in the current directory, instead of displaying text on the console. -- cgit v0.12