Getting the docstring from a function

I have the following function:

def my_func():
    """My docstring is both funny and informative"""
    pass

How do I get access to the docstring?

Interactively, you can display it with

help(my_func)

Or from code you can retrieve it with

my_func.__doc__

You can also use inspect.getdoc. It cleans up the __doc__ by normalizing tabs to spaces and left shifting the doc body to remove common leading spaces.

On ipython or jupyter notebook, you can use all the above mentioned ways, but i go with

my_func?

or

?my_func

for quick summary of both method signature and docstring.

I avoid using

my_func??

(as commented by @rohan) for docstring and use it only to check the source code

import ast
import sys
f = open(sys.argv[1], "r") #filename input
module = ast.parse(f.read())
class_definitions = [node for node in module.body if isinstance(node, ast.ClassDef)]
method_definitions = []
for class_def in class_definitions:
        print(class_def.name)
        print(ast.get_docstring(class_def))
        function_definitions = [node for node in class_def.body if isinstance(node, ast.FunctionDef)]
        for f in function_definitions:
                print('\t---')
                print('\t'+f.name)
                print('\t---')
                print('\t'+'\t'.join(ast.get_docstring(f).splitlines(True)))
        print('----')