Question

When declaring a class that inherits from a specific class:

class C(dict):
    added_attribute = 0

the documentation for class C lists all the methods of dict (either through help(C) or pydoc).

Is there a way to hide the inherited methods from the automatically generated documentation (the documentation string can refer to the base class, for non-overwritten methods)? or is it impossible?

This would be useful: pydoc lists the functions defined in a module after its classes. Thus, when the classes have a very long documentation, a lot of less than useful information is printed before the new functions provided by the module are presented, which makes the documentation harder to exploit (you have to skip all the documentation for the inherited methods until you reach something specific to the module being documented).

Answer 1

pydoc and the help builtin don’t support this, but there’s no reason you couldn’t write your own tool (perhaps by modifying pydoc’s source) that would have the behavior you desire. Just walk the dict of classes to get the locally-defined attributes, then look for things that have doc as an attribute.