Jedi - Python autocompletions (hints) not showing methods or suggestions

Question

I'm currently working on Sublime Text 3 using Jedi - Python autocompletions and it works with most basic things. However I use it like in this case with BeautifulSoup4

The main issue is not displaying properly completions for when doing multiple dot (.) methods on a file and the completor has to rely on seeing it first like .find_all method then it will suggest it (however this seems to be the autocompletion from Sublime Text 3 itself).

What happens in the next case

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup # works ok, shows all suggestions

request = requests.get('http://example.com')    
soup = Soup(request.text, 'lxml')


main = soup.find('body') # shows find method 
# However, No available completions in the next case
second_lookup = main.find('div') # doesn't show any autocompletions/hints when starting w/ .fi..

Same goes when looking any other 'deeper' methods for autocompletions. I've tried so far tweaking all the settings in the Jedi..settings file. That didn't help and I've tried using Anaconda as it has some additional tools also including Jedi.

This seems to be specific to some libraries like numpy and bs4 for example.

Note:

This isn't specific to Sublime Text 3. Same thing goes for Atom and similar IDEs.

Answer 1

Python is a dynamic language. Arguments of a function or method rely completely on type specification by docstrings. Same goes for return type.

For example, this is docstring (or documentation) of a get function of requests module:

def get(url, params=None, **kwargs):
    r"""Sends a GET request.

    :param url: URL for the new :class:`Request` object.
    :param params: (optional) Dictionary, list of tuples or bytes to send
        in the query string for the :class:`Request`.
    :param \*\*kwargs: Optional arguments that ``request`` takes.
    :return: :class:`Response <Response>` object
    :rtype: requests.Response
    """

    kwargs.setdefault('allow_redirects', True)
    return request('get', url, params=params, **kwargs)

Return type is specified in function definition. You can also specify type of arguments for functions.

However, the find method of Soup class is written like this:

def find(self, name=None, attrs={}, recursive=True, text=None,
         **kwargs):
    """Return only the first child of this Tag matching the given
    criteria."""
    r = None
    l = self.find_all(name, attrs, recursive, text, 1, **kwargs)
    if l:
        r = l[0]
    return r

Editors can lookup find method of Soup class. But, they don't know what type of object this method returns.

---

Workaround is to specify type when assigning to variable:

import requests
from bs4 import Tag
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as Soup

request = requests.get('http://example.com')

soup = Soup(request.text, 'lxml')

main: Tag  = soup.find('body')

# Auto completion works.
second_lookup = main.find('div')

Or you can add :rtype: Tag to find docstring. I know it returns Tag object since type(main) or type(second_lookup) both return <class 'bs4.element.Tag'>.

Links I provided are enough for you to learn about static typing in python and perfectly document your code. Hope this helps.