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Writing docstrings

We just learned some about the benefits of docstrings. In this exercise, you will practice writing docstrings that can be utilized by a documentation generator like Sphinx.

Note that your docstring submission must match the solution exactly. If you find yourself getting it wrong several times, it may be a good idea to refresh the sample code and start over.

This exercise is part of the course

Software Engineering Principles in Python

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • Complete the portions of the docstring that document the parameters.
  • Complete the portion of the docstring describing the return value.
  • Complete the example function usage in the docstring.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Complete the function's docstring
def tokenize(text, regex=r'[a-zA-z]+'):
  """Split text into tokens using a regular expression

  :____ text: text to be tokenized
  :param ____: regular expression used to match tokens using re.findall 
  :____: a list of resulting tokens

  >>> ____('the rain in spain')
  ____
  """
  return re.findall(regex, text, flags=re.IGNORECASE)

# Print the docstring
help(tokenize)
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