Leah Culver

17 Comments

1. Joey

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 11:44 am | Permalink

   Even better:

   import pprint
   pprint.pprint(dir(mod_or_obj))

   Also good:

   print ‘, ‘.join(dir(mod_or_obj))

2. mikeal

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 11:46 am | Permalink

   I can’t even express how happy I am with ipython.

   obj.

   Oh, i love it.

3. Alcides Fonseca

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 11:52 am | Permalink

   Before I knew about dir(), I actually used import inspect; inspect.getmembers(obj). When I decided to see the source to learn how it’s printing me the contents of the file, I saw it was using dir, but making it prettier.

   So here’s an alternative.

4. kenkeiter

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm | Permalink

   Long time no talk! I suppose you’ve been pretty busy though, so no worries. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see you when you were up in Portland — I think I would have been able to mitigate your pizza problem haha (I’m pretty much a connoisseur). Anyway, I hope life is going well for you!

   Ooh, and you may want to consider blurring out Virgil’s email addy from the message headers. I did it for you and posted it on my CDN — you can just link it over if you want: http://cdn.sixpixelsapart.com/images/leahculver_com__python-dir-chat.png

   All the best!
   -Ken

5. Ray Slakinski

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 4:19 pm | Permalink

   I’m a big fan of help(module) as well, as long as the dev put in some decent comments that is

   And please try TextMate Leah! you have no idea what your missing… make sure you add the django bundle

6. Dean Landolt

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 5:53 pm | Permalink

   “I’m also a fan of ‘print something.__class__’”

   Did you mean ‘print something.__doc__’? That’s a lot more helpful (when using a module who’s author was kind enough to use docstrings).

7. Bulkan Evcimen

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 8:14 pm | Permalink

   Try;

   import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

   anywhere in the code and when that line gets executed you will drop into the Python Debugger.

8. Ben Walton

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 9:42 pm | Permalink

   I’ve just always used…
   obj.
   in the console.

9. Ben Walton

   Posted August 10, 2008 at 9:43 pm | Permalink

   That was supposed to be
   obj.(tab)(tab)

10. wiz

    Posted August 10, 2008 at 11:32 pm | Permalink

    import pdb; pdb.set_trace() — very povurful toy.

11. Tyler Menezes

    Posted August 11, 2008 at 4:27 pm | Permalink

    I see why people like Python. In PHP to list directory contents you +just+ do:

    $dir = dir(”module”);
    while(($file = $dir->read()) !== false)
    echo $file;
    $dir->close();

12. Tom

    Posted August 12, 2008 at 2:58 pm | Permalink

    Of course by posting this as an image it’s not indexable by Google…

13. Isaac

    Posted August 15, 2008 at 1:49 pm | Permalink

    > I see why people like Python. In PHP to list
    > directory contents you +just+ do:

    > $dir = dir(”module”);
    > while(($file = $dir->read()) !== false)
    > echo $file;
    > $dir->close();

    dir() in python, according to the post, doesn’t do that at all. It lists the contents of an *object*, which means whoever named dir() in python failed.

    The equivalent in php is as easy as in python.

    print_r($object)

14. Anonymous

    Posted August 18, 2008 at 5:13 am | Permalink

    hi from 4chan!

15. Skytak

    Posted August 18, 2008 at 10:31 pm | Permalink

    Meh, if you want it short in PHP, just do print_r(glob(”module/*”));

16. Sean F

    Posted August 19, 2008 at 3:08 pm | Permalink

    vim omni-completion FTW

17. Mark Peloquin

    Posted August 20, 2008 at 10:25 pm | Permalink

    I see nobody’s ever heard of pydoc. Much like perldoc, you can look up documentation on any module, class, function, method, etc from the CLI.

    $ pydoc os
    $ pydoc os.path
    $ pydoc os.path.join