Docstrings in Python

A docstring is short for documentation string.

Python docstrings (documentation strings) are the string literals that appear right after the definition of a function, method, class, or module.

Triple quotes are used while writing docstrings. For example:

def double(num):
    """Function to double the value"""
    return 2*num

Docstrings appear right after the definition of a function, class, or a module. This separates docstrings from multiline comments using triple quotes.

The docstrings are associated with the object as their __doc__ attribute.

So, we can access the docstrings of the above function with the following lines of code:

def double(num):
    """Function to double the value"""
    return 2*num
print(double.__doc__)

Output

Function to double the value

To learn more about docstrings in Python, visit Python Docstrings.