What is the use of help() and dir() in Python?

Both are built-in functions that help you explore Python from the console. help() shows the documentation of a function, class or module. dir() shows a list of the names (attributes and methods) that an object has.

def greet(name):
    """Print a greeting."""
    print("Hi", name)

help(greet)

Output:

items = [3, 1, 2]
print("append" in dir(items))
print("upper" in dir(items))

Output:

So dir() answers “what can I do with this object?” and help() answers “how do I use it?”. The text shown by help() comes from the docstring.

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