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3.5.5 The documentation Command

• The command documentation

Function: documentation function &optional verbatim ¶

This function returns the documentation string of ‘FUNCTION’. It handles macros, named keyboard macros, and special forms, as well as ordinary functions.

If ‘FUNCTION’ is a symbol, this function first looks for the ‘function-documentation’ property of that symbol; if that has a non-nil value, the documentation comes from that value (if the value is not a string, it is evaluated).

If ‘FUNCTION’ is not a symbol, or if it has no ‘function-documentation’ property, then documentation extracts the documentation string from the actual function definition, reading it from a file if called for.