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This patch adds a 'symbols' link after the 'topics' and 'keywords' links in the html browser menu bar.
help('symbols') worked, but there was no way to get to it in the html browser.
This also adds unquote_plus() to the url handler to unquote the html input form fields. This is needed to allow entering the symbols.

New slightly improved patch. Combined the topic index's, topics, keywords, and the new symbols case, into a single html_topicsindex(title) function.

Just from a bit of testing without looking at the patch very much, there are a couple of things that need to be fixed. First, the + and += links don't work, tested on Firefox and Konqueror on Linux. Second, there are a couple of symbols which should have been removed from the listing back in the 3.0 days: <> and `.
I like the idea, though.

Thanks for catching that. I had used unquote_plus instead of unquote. That is needed for multi-field form data, pydoc doens't need it.
Removed the back tick from the pydoc symbols list. The topic link for that symbol was already removed.
I also attempted to make the escape() usage a bit better by using the escape function from the html package in more places. It does just a bit better job of escaping.
I wasn't aware help() would take a "symbols" argument when I added the "keywords" and "topics" pages to the html server. I've been meaning to get this in for a while.

Updated the patch.

Aside from '<>' still being present, the patch looks good to me. There are a couple of issues with content, but those are separate from this issue. (For instance, '~', '>>', and '<<' direct to the BITWISE page, which doesn't mention any of them at all.)

Patch update: "<>" removed from pydoc symbols table.

I agree the specific content for each symbol are separate issues. Those are probably best addressed individually or a few at a time when they are closely related.

Adding you Nick, I don't have commit rights. This probably doesn't need much.. maybe a one line comment in news is all. (And maybe not even that.)

I'll take a closer look at this prior to beta 1.
In the meantime, Ron, I just noticed we don't have a Contributor Licensing Agreement in place for you. Given your past contributions, we should probably fix that :)
The form can be signed electronically these days: http://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/ 

It looks like this patch was close to being approved. Ron, would you be able to open a Github pull request for your patch? Thanks!

Hey Ron,
Friendly ping :)
Can you please convert this into a pull request?