Adding and Editing Documentation
Learn how to efficiently edit docstrings and add documentation with Codegen
Codegen’s GraphSitter library provides powerful APIs for editing docstrings and adding documentation to your codebase. This guide will walk you through the process of modifying existing docstrings and adding new documentation to functions, classes, and modules.
Common use cases include:
- Updating outdated docstrings
- Adding missing parameter and return type descriptions
- Standardizing documentation format across the codebase
- Adding examples to function docstrings
set_docstring
Editing docstrings and adding documentation involves accessing and modifying the docstring
property of various code elements. Here’s a basic example:
By default, set_docstring tries to intelligently format the docstring to match the existing format. This can be turned on and off using auto_format
and clean_format
flags.
Determine Documentation Coverage
To see your current documentation coverage, you can iterate through all symbols of interest and count the number of docstrings:
Leveraging AI for Generating Documentation
For non-trivial codebases, it can be challenging to achieve full documentation coverage.
The most efficient way to edit informative docstrings is to use codebase.ai to generate docstrings, then use the set_docstring method to update the docstring.
Adding Explicit Parameter Names and Types
Alternatively, you can also rely on deterministic string formatting to edit docstrings.
To add “Google-style” parameter names and types to a function docstring, you can use the following code snippet:
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