Allow param lists to split on ': ' rather than ' : '

[jnothman]

It is very easy to mistakenly separate parameter names from their type description by ': ' instead of the correct ' : '. There are at least 260 instances in Scikit-learn, for instance, and Joblib appears to use : without a preceding space as a standard. This variation is unsurprising when See Also, for instance, does not require a space before its colons.

Would we expect great ramifications were we to change it to allow a single colon followed by whitespace as delimiter?

[jnothman]

Ping @scikit-learn

[stefanv]

How about we split correctly but issue a warning?

[jnothman]

See, by the way, my attempt (via grep, sed, git apply, git add --patch) to fix such errors in scikit-learn at scikit-learn/scikit-learn#7920

I considered a warning, and don't mind it. I'd actually rather something that output a git patch :) Main problem is that I don't think NumpyDocstring has enough context information to make the warning very informative.

[stefanv]

That grep script is truly horrific ;)

[jnothman]

I did try implementing it in numpydoc, but got sick at the thought of putting all the context info in.

This worked :)

[stefanv]

So, if you have something that works, would fixing numpydoc still be useful to you, or should we just add that "fixer" into the README?

[jnothman]

I think fixing numpydoc is worthwhile. I wanted a way to resolve these
quickly so that we can then use numpydoc to check for inconsistencies
between signature and docstrings.

On 23 November 2016 at 09:52, Stefan van der Walt notifications@github.com
wrote:

So, if you have something that works, would fixing numpydoc still be
useful to you, or should we just add that "fixer" into the README?

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[stefanv]

I think this and other discussions around similar requests has helped settle the issue in my mind: we should stick to one docstring format, and rather help those who want to fix their projects with a linter-type tool.

[jnothman]

The problem with that statement is that the docstring format is somewhat inconsistent: see also allows leading space or none; parameters allows with leading space only.

[jnothman]

But yes, I'm happy with a linter/fixer.

[stefanv]

The docstring format seems consistent? https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/doc/HOWTO_DOCUMENT.rst.txt

[jnothman]

But the implementation is not similarly restrictive:
https://github.com/numpy/numpydoc/blob/master/numpydoc/docscrape.py#L255

On 23 November 2016 at 12:42, Stefan van der Walt notifications@github.com
wrote:

The docstring format seems consistent? https://github.com/numpy/
numpy/blob/master/doc/HOWTO_DOCUMENT.rst.txt

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[jnothman]

I'll submit a PR for a linter/fixer.

[stefanv]

Thanks @jnothman, I'd be happy to review that.