Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

You need to perform the following steps for this recipe:

1. The Python standard library provides a functools.wraps decorator that can be applied to decorators to have them preserve the properties of the decorated functions:

from functools import wraps


def decorator(f):
    @wraps(f)
    def _f(*args, **kwargs):
        return f(*args, **kwargs)
    return _f

2. Here we apply the decorator to a function:

@decorator
def sumthree(a, b):
    """Sums a and b"""
    return a + back

3. As you can see, it will properly retain the name and docstring of the function:

>>> print(sumthree.__name__)
'sumthree'
>>> print(sumthree.__doc__)
'Sums a and b'

If the decorated function had custom attributes, those will be copied to the new function too.