Inline documentation

The standard library

The xeus-cpp kernel allows users to access help on functions and classes of the standard library.

In a code cell, typing ?std::vector will simply display the help page on vector from the cppreference website.

_images/vector_help.png

Enabling the quick-help feature for third-party libraries

The quick help feature can be enabled for other libraries. To do so, a doxygen tag file for your library must be placed under the xeus-cpp “data” directory of the installation prefix, namely

PREFIX/share/xeus-cpp/tagfiles

For xeus-cpp to be able to make use of that information, a JSON configuration file must be placed under the xeus-cpp configuration directory of the installation prefix, namely

PREFIX/etc/xeus-cpp/tags.d

Note

For more information on how to generate tag files for a doxygen documentation, check the relevant section of the doxygen documentation.

The format for the JSON configuration file is the following

{
    "url": "Base URL for the documentation",
    "tagfile": "Name of the doxygen tagfile"
}

For example the JSON configuration file for the documentation of the standard library is

{
    "url": "https://en.cppreference.com/w/",
    "tagfile": "cppreference-doxygen-web.tag.xml"
}

Note

We recommend that you only use the https protocol for the URL. Indeed, when the notebook is served over https, content from unsecure sources will not be rendered.