edit: I feel like the real life examples in the PHP docs are very nice, but not really missing in Python (there are a lot examples in the Python documentation but not for such trivial functions). In python you just start the interactive interpreter and do "import module", "module.function(xyz)" and you see exactly what's going on. It's then a copy&paste away from your shell to your editor.

It's bit strange strange that you gave undocumented function as an example of how PHP functions are documented. :-)

This difference between Python docs and PHP docs is just the thing I noticed when I started having fun with Python which is btw awesome language though finding which lib to use for given task sometimes is hard.

Good thing to do to find out what python function does is running help(module_name.function_name) in interpreter.