%help magic does not work for Stata commands

[arnonerba]

The %help magic does not currently seem to work for Stata commands. Built-in commands like %help magics work, but Stata-specific queries like %help histogram do not. The cell is marked as [*] in JupyterLab and never returns any output.

I can confirm this behavior on an Ubuntu 20.04 system running Stata 17 and on a Windows system running Stata 15. The stata_kernel debug log is empty.

[mcaceresb]

Just to confirm, do you have internet? (i.e. while running the kernel)

[arnonerba]

Yep, I have Internet access, and help commands work properly in the Stata app itself (at least on the Ubuntu 20.04 machine).

[poisoners]

Modify the code in stata_magics.py located in \Lib\site-packages\stata_kernel.

Original code:

reply = urllib.request.urlopen(self.html_help.format(cmd))
html = reply.read().decode("utf-8")

Change it to:

reply = requests.get(self.html_help.format(cmd))
html = reply.text

[poisoners]

Also need to add import requests at the beginning.

I'm not sure why, but using requests to fetch the webpage works fine, while using urllib does not.