Revealing documentation in Python

Situation: You’re doing automated data-collection using Selenium’s Python Client Driver but can’t find any documentation online on the Select class. What now?

If the developers included docstrings in the class, we’re in luck! Python’s help function shows any source documentation of the object or class passed to it.

>>> select_element = Select(driver.find_element_by_tag_name('select'))
>>> help(select_element)
Help on instance of Select in module selenium.webdriver.support.select:

class Select
 |  Methods defined here:
 |  
 |  __init__(self, webelement)
 |      Constructor. A check is made that the given element is, indeed, a SELECT tag.
 |      If it is not, then an UnexpectedTagNameException is thrown.
 |
 |      :Args:
 |       - webelement - element SELECT element to wrap
 |
 |      Example:
 |          from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import Select
 |
 |          Select(driver.find_element_by_tag_name("select")).select_by_index(2)
 |  
 |  deselect_all(self)
 |      Clear all selected entries.
 |      This is only valid when the SELECT supports multiple selections.
 |      throws NotImplementedError If the SELECT does not support multiple selections
 |  
:

Lucky me, the Select class contains detailed docstrings.

And if you want to see all the method names, you can use dir(object).

>>> dir(select_element)
['__doc__', '__init__', ..., 'select_by_value', 'select_by_visible_text']

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