Feature request: Attribute docstring parsing for dataclasses

[phil65]

Hey!
Really a fan of this library (and many other of your libraries too), so thank you for the work you put in first of all.

I wonder if it would be possible to support attribute docstrings for dataclasses for the description?
I think it needs parsing the AST, but I think it shouldnt be too complicated. Some code to show a POC:

def get_field_docs(cls: type) -> dict[str, Any]:
    source = dedent(inspect.getsource(cls))
    docstrings = {}
    for node in ast.walk(ast.parse(source)):
        if isinstance(node, ast.AnnAssign) and isinstance(node.target, ast.Name): 
            if (docstring_node := node.value) and isinstance(
                docstring_node, ast.Constant
            ):
                docstrings[node.target.id] = docstring_node.value
    return docstrings

Not sure how robust this approach is, perhaps its worth it to check how pydantic for example does it (when use_attribute_docstrings is set to True),
but for me, this would be a very helpful addition.
Cheers and thank you!

[tlambert03]

hey @phil65, thanks for your note

Yeah, attribute docstrings has been coming up recently at griffe-fieldz as well: pyapp-kit/griffe-fieldz#17

is your use case outside of generating documentation? I'd kind of like to avoid AST parsing if we can avoid it, but i agree it shouldn't be terribly hard (and I can look at how pydantic does it)

[phil65]

Yes, I also have use cases outside of documentation. Would be cool if it could get added, but otherwise it´s not a big deal if you follow a no-AST policy here, I would just wrap your library then and special-case dataclasses.

[tlambert03]

no policy :) i'm open to it. let's have a look 👍

[phil65]

Thank you!