Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python

PEP 257 and docutils

PEP 257 documents the expectations of Python programmers and tools with respect to docstrings. The basic rules are quite simple. These are as follows:

The documentation is available at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/.

• Use triple quotes to delimit the docstring. Triple quotes are how Python expresses the idea of a multiline text string.
• The closing triple quotes should be on a line of their own if your docstring is longer than one line.
• The first line should present a short description of the thing being documented, such as "return the distance between n-points a and b."

After the first line, we can either end the docstring or insert a blank line, followed by a more in-depth description of the documented object, ...