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pythonsyntax-errorpydoc

Why does my pydoc command retrieve a exception.syntaxerror?

I a beginner level python user and when I type the following in the terminal:

$ pydoc Inleesgenbank.py

I get the following error message:

problem in ./Inleesgenbank.py - : invalid syntax (Inleesgenbank.py, line 30)

So at line 30 there must be a syntaxis error in this code:

def usage(msg1=''):
    """Levert de docstring met een foutspecificatie bij een gebruikersfout"""
    print(__doc__, file=sys.stderr)
    if len(msg1) > 0:
        print('FOUTMELDING:', msg1, file=sys.stderr)

Line 30 is the line: print(__doc__, file=sys.stderr)

I know this is not a very clean piece of code but I want to learn what is wrong with it.

Solution

  • I don't get a syntax error running on Python 3, but I do get a syntax error on Python 2. You are using the Python 3 print syntax.

    For Python 2 you should use:

    print >> sys.stderr, usage.__doc__

    Note also that you probably meant usage.__doc__