DOC: TimeStamp.strftime() missing argument description

[Dr-Irv]

Location of the documentation

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/dev/reference/api/pandas.Timestamp.strftime.html?highlight=strftime#pandas.Timestamp.strftime

Documentation problem

The argument for TimeStamp.strftime() is missing in the docs

Suggested fix for documentation

Argument is a format string. Should reference python docs https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html

[TomAugspurger]

I think this is a CPython issue. We subclass datetime.datetime, and don't override strftime.

In [9]: pd.Timestamp.strftime is datetime.datetime.strftime
Out[9]: True

[Dr-Irv]

@TomAugspurger So how does the doc page for Timestamp.strftime() get generated?

[jorisvandenbossche]

So how does the doc page for Timestamp.strftime() get generated?

The docstring is inherited as well, so pd.Timestamp.strftime.__doc__ is the docstring of the stdlib (which is not very informative).

We could override the method just to add a more elaborate docstring.

[Dr-Irv]

I think we'd have to also make sure it picks up the parameter correctly. If you look at the current doc, it doesn't indicate that format is a parameter to Timestamp.strftime() .

Is this possibly an issue with how the methods for datetime.datetime are picked up when we build the docs for Timestamp, and when this happens, we aren't picking up the parameters correctly?

[jorisvandenbossche]

That's again still an issue with datetime.datetime, which simply has no information about its arguments (eg inspecting the signature of it will fail), and which we inherit

[7astro7]

take

[7astro7]

Hi, does solution to #37559 resolve this? I'm unsure despite the open tag and would appreciate other people's opinions on if this still needs addressing. If unresolved, is ~/pandas/_libs/tslibs/timestamps.pyx the correct file to change the documentation in?

[TomAugspurger]

I think this is being resolved in python/cpython#20677. Nothing to do in pandas.

@7astro7 let us know if you need help finding another issue.

[jorisvandenbossche]

It was actually resolved by #37559 on the pandas side. That PR added a Timestamp.strftime method overriding the parent datetime.datetime method, to add a docstring.
(and it's probably good to do this anyway, as the upstream python one uses different non-numpydoc docstring formatting)