Re: [OctDev] Re: email not getting through

[David B. <Dav...@mo...>]

According to Stefan van der Walt <st...@su...> (on 06/03/04):
> Getting a function's description would be a lot easier if 'help' could
> return the string produced by help(func)... Would this be easy to add?

The problem is that "help" is a function that itself calls different
functions that return void, who themselves call other functions that
are void. So the change is likely to be large if we try and get all of
these functions to return a string.

An alternative, is that all of these functions write to the stream "os"
and so you could hijack this stream and replace it with a string
stream that is used to create your return value. You'd also need to
turn off the pager and ignore calls like "help -i <file>". You'll then
need to put the pager and stream os back in place before returning

Unfortunately you can't write your own version of help that does this as 
the functions simple_help and builtin_help in help.cc are both static.
So you'll either need octave to be modified to include the above change
or at least make simple_help and builtin_help callable externally....

An alternative is that you can have access to the symbol table and files
helps from within an oct-file  (but not the keywords or operators, as
these are static in help.cc). A test implementation that allows the help
text to be accessed in this manner is in the attached oct-file. You can
do something like 'fft_help = helpstring("fft")' to get the help text of
the fft in this manner.

Regards
David


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David Bateman                                Dav...@mo...
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