Documenting Files With "from X Import *"

Can sphinx's .. automodule:: and other automatic features be used to document modules that include from x import * statements without including all of the documentation from import

Solution 1:

Yes, that should work. From the documentation:

In an automodule directive with the members option set, only module members whose __module__ attribute is equal to the module name as given to automodule will be documented. This is to prevent documentation of imported classes or functions.

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Update:

The problem seems to be that the __module__ attribute of many pylab members is None (the members defined in the C/Cython module mtrand, as far as I can tell).

The mtrand module is part of NumPy. Behind the scenes, pylab.beta (and several other functions) is a method of the class numpy.random.mtrand.RandomState. I can reproduce the documentation issue as follows:

With this source (pylabtest.py)

from pylab import beta

defmzjn(x):
    """mzjn docstring"""return x

and this source documentation (pylabtest.rst)

Pylab test
==========

.. automodule:: pylabtest
    :members:

the Sphinx output in pylabtest.html includes both beta and mzjn.

But if

beta.__module__ = "pylab"

is added to pylabtest.py, only mzjn is documented.