Using pydoc for non-public/private classes

Question

When I use _ as a prefix for a class name (see also this and this), the class becomes non-public and is not displayed by pydoc:

    class _DoNotShowMeInPydoc:
      """Class Documentation which is not displayed"""

That's just what I want, because this class is used only internally and is of no importance for people who use the module.

But - what if someone comes along who wants to know about the internals of my module, which are (of course) also documented. Is there a flag or an option for pydoc to display the non-public classes?

Answer 1

Let's just assume there are a variety of audiences for documentation and there is value in reading code through documentation separate from the source code itself.

Pydoc supports almost no switches to control the output. Access levels are generally ad hoc conventions and not part of the python language.

Pydoc follows this not so easy to summarize rules to decide what is private-as-in-do-not-document. So your only option is to change your code to get it passed the visiblename() function.

Pdoc3, a pydoc replacement, uses the __pdoc__ dictionary to override rules that are similar to pydoc's.

I created a fork of pydoc that generates documentation for everything by default.