Get Class Methods with Python
As a newbie to the excellent world of Python development, I'm not always familiar with the methods provided by imported classes. Oftentimes these classes are well-documented but in the case that methods aren't documented, I found the dir function useful for getting a list of methods:
# dir({object})
dir(difflib)
"""
Returns:
['Differ', 'HtmlDiff', 'IS_CHARACTER_JUNK', 'IS_LINE_JUNK', 'Match', 'SequenceMatcher', '__all__', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', '__package__', '_calculate_ratio', '_count_leading', '_file_template', '_legend', '_mdiff', '_namedtuple', '_styles', '_table_template', '_test', 'context_diff', 'get_close_matches', 'heapq', 'ndiff', 'reduce', 'restore', 'unified_diff']
"""
The snippet above does exactly what you would expect -- provides a list of method names for the viewing!
Isn’t this normall done with
dir(difflib)?That does the same thing but alphabetizes the result. Thanks for mentioning that!
It does not do the same thing. dir(my_object) will show you everything you can do on the instance, including methods on the class, and superclasses. __dict__ will only show you the unique things that belong to the object, which isn’t very many.
Thanks for the additional information Jasper! I’ve updated my post!
You can also use bpython shell which is a nice alternative to ipython and standard python ones. It has auto-completion which displays all available methods and attributes on any object. It can be installed in virtualenv with
pip install bpython.