Seeking documentation for qgis.utils module?

Question

There is a PyQGIS module called utils that I can't find any documentation for. It seems to have some useful functions for loaded plugins.

Within the Python console in QGIS you can run qgis.utils.plugins and a dictionary for each loaded plugin is returned.

dir(qgis.utils.plugins)

returns this list of attributes

['__class__', '__cmp__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__iter__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 'clear', 'copy', 'fromkeys', 'get', 'has_key', 'items', 'iteritems', 'iterkeys', 'itervalues', 'keys', 'pop', 'popitem', 'setdefault', 'update', 'values', 'viewitems', 'viewkeys', 'viewvalues']

And this returns the attributes of an instance of a plugin:

dir(qgis.utils.plugins.get('<plugin-name>'))

Seems like this could be useful for building unit tests or creating interactions between plugins.

However I cannot find any documentation about the utils module in the QGIS API Documentation. This description has been provided: Difference between qgis.utils and qgis.core?, but is there further documentation that describes the purpose of this module?

Answer 1

If you type help(qgis.utils) in the Python Console, it will print the associated functions within that module with a basic description for each.

I also cannot find documentation for it but you could check the utils.py file in the QGIS directory (mine is in C:/OSGeo4W64/apps/qgis/python/qgis/) to see how each of the associated function works.