Cookbook: Sending built in help to the pager

IPython's %pinfo (?) and %pinfo2 (??) interactive help commands use the pager to avoid flooding the shell with long blocks of text.

Here is a magic command to give the same behavior to Python's built-in (pydoc) help command:

from IPython.core import page
def magic_help(self, s):
    """Retrieve the pydoc help for an object and display it through a pager.
    """
    info = self._ofind(s)
    if info['found']:
        import pydoc
        page.page(pydoc.plain(pydoc.render_doc(info["obj"])))
    else:
        print 'Object `%s` not found' % s

ip = get_ipython()
ip.define_magic("help",magic_help)

After running this code from the interactive prompt or via your local config settings, you can send help through the pager like so:

import re
%help re