introspection

[Ben Finney]

brad tilley <rtilley at vt.edu> writes:

> How do I import a module and then ask it to show me its methods or other 
> aspects about itself during execution? I'd like to do something such as 
> this:
>
> import win32api
>
> print win32api.methods()
>
> I'd like to write some test scripts that load modules and probe them
> for information about themselves.

As well as the 'inspect' module, you may be able to get some distance
just with builtin functionality::

    >>> import re

    >>> dir(re)
    ['DOTALL', 'I', 'IGNORECASE', 'L', 'LOCALE', 'M', 'MULTILINE',
    'S', 'U', 'UNICODE', 'VERBOSE', 'X', '__all__', '__builtins__',
    '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 'compile', 'engine', 'error',
    'escape', 'findall', 'finditer', 'match', 'purge', 'search',
    'split', 'sub', 'subn', 'template']

    >>> [(n, getattr(re, n)) for n in dir(re)]
    [('DOTALL', 16), ('I', 2), ('IGNORECASE', 2), ('L', 4), ('LOCALE',
    4), ('M', 8), ('MULTILINE', 8), ('S', 16), ('U', 32), ('UNICODE',
    32), ('VERBOSE', 64), ('X', 64), ('__all__', ['match', 'search',
    'sub', 'subn', 'split', 'findall', 'compile', 'purge', 'template',
    'escape', 'I', 'L', 'M', 'S', 'X', 'U', 'IGNORECASE', 'LOCALE',
    'MULTILINE', 'DOTALL', 'VERBOSE', 'UNICODE', 'error',
    'finditer']),
    [...]
    ]

    >>> [n for n in dir(re) if hasattr(getattr(re, n), '__call__')]
    ['compile', 'escape', 'findall', 'finditer', 'match', 'purge',
    'search', 'split', 'sub', 'subn', 'template']

-- 
 \            "Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, |
  `\         nations and ages it is the rule."  -- Friedrich Nietzsche |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney