What is the Python equivalent of Ruby's "inspect"?

I ju开发者_开发百科st want to quickly see the properties and values of an object in Python, how do I do that in the terminal on a mac (very basic stuff, never used python)?

Specifically, I want to see what message.attachments are in this Google App Engine MailHandler example (images, videos, docs, etc.).

If you want to dump the entire object, you can use the pprint module to get a pretty-printed version of it.

from pprint import pprint

pprint(my_object)

# If there are many levels of recursion, and you don't want to see them all
# you can use the depth parameter to limit how many levels it goes down
pprint(my_object, depth=2)

Edit: I may have misread what you meant by 'object' - if you're wanting to look at class instances, as opposed to basic data structures like dicts, you may want to look at the inspect module instead.

use the getmembers attribute of the inspect module

It will return a list of (key, value) tuples. It gets the value from obj.__dict__ if available and uses getattr if the the there is no corresponding entry in obj.__dict__. It can save you from writing a few lines of code for this purpose.

Update

There are better ways to do this than dir. See other answers.

Original Answer

Use the built in function dir(fp) to see the attributes of fp.

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned Python's __str__ method, which provides a string representation of an object. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to print automatically in pdb.

One can also use __repr__ for that, but __repr__ has other requirements: for one thing, you are (at least in theory) supposed to be able to eval() the output of __repr__, though that requirement seems to be enforced only rarely.

Try

repr(obj) # returns a printable representation of the given object

or

dir(obj) # the list of object methods

or

obj.__dict__ # object variables

Or unify Abrer and Mazur answers and get:

from pprint import pprint
pprint(my_object.__dict__ )