Whether you’re new to Python, been using it for a few years or you’re an expert, knowing how to use Python’s introspection capabilities can help your understanding of your code and that new package you just downloaded with the crappy documentation. Introspection is a fancy word that means to observe oneself and ponder one’s thoughts, senses, and desires. In Python world, introspection is actually kind of similar. Introspection in this case is to use Python to figure out Python. In this article, you can learn how to use Python to give yourself a clue about the code you’re working on or trying to learn. Some might even call it a form of debugging.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

type

dir

help

sys

It should be noted that this is not an in-depth article. It will just give you the tools to get going. But enough blather, we need to get on with it!

The Python Type

You may not know this, but Python may just be your type. Yes, Python can tell you what type of variable you have or what type is returned from a function. It’s a very handy little tool. Let’s look at a few examples to make it all clear:

>>> x = "test" >>> y = 7 >>> z = None >>> type(x) >>> type(y) >>> type(z)

As you can see, Python has a keyword called type that can tell you what is what. In my real-life experiences, I’ve used type to help me figure out what is going on when my database data is corrupt or not what I expect. I just add a couple lines and print out each row’s data along with its type. This has helped me a lot when I’ve been dumb-founded by some stupid code I wrote.

The Python Dir

What is dir? Is it something you say when someone says or does something stupid? Not in this context! No, here on Planet Python, the dir keyword (AKA: builtin) is used to tell the programmer what attributes there are in the passed in object. If you forget to pass in an object, dir will return a list of names in the current scope. As usual, this is easier to understand with a few examples.

>>> dir("test") ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']

Since everything in Python is an object, we can pass a string to dir and find out what methods it has. Pretty neat, huh? Now let’s try it with an imported module:

>>> import sys >>> dir(sys) ['__displayhook__', '__doc__', '__egginsert', '__excepthook__', '__name__', '__plen', '__stderr__', '__stdin__', '__stdout__', '_getframe', 'api_version', 'argv', 'builtin_module_names', 'byteorder', 'call_tracing', 'callstats', 'copyright', 'displayhook', 'dllhandle', 'exc_clear', 'exc_info', 'exc_traceback', 'exc_type', 'exc_value', 'excepthook', 'exec_prefix', 'executable', 'exit', 'exitfunc', 'getcheckinterval', 'getdefaultencoding', 'getfilesystemencoding', 'getrecursionlimit', 'getrefcount', 'getwindowsversion', 'hexversion', 'maxint', 'maxunicode', 'meta_path', 'modules', 'path', 'path_hooks', 'path_importer_cache', 'platform', 'prefix', 'setcheckinterval', 'setprofile', 'setrecursionlimit', 'settrace', 'stderr', 'stdin', 'stdout', 'version', 'version_info', 'warnoptions', 'winver']

Now, that’s handy! If you haven’t figured it out yet, the dir function is extremely handy for those 3rd party packages that you have downloaded (or will soon download) that have little to no documentation. How do you find out about what methods are available in these cases? Well, dir will help you figure it out. Of course, sometimes the documentation is in the code itself, which brings us to the builtin help utility.

Python Help!

Python comes with a handy help utility. Just type “help()” (minus the quotes) into a Python shell and you’ll see the following directions (Python version may vary…)

>>> help() Welcome to Python 2.6! This is the online help utility. If this is your first time using Python, you should definitely check out the tutorial on the Internet at http://www.python.org/doc/tut/. Enter the name of any module, keyword, or topic to get help on writing Python programs and using Python modules. To quit this help utility and return to the interpreter, just type "quit". To get a list of available modules, keywords, or topics, type "modules", "keywords", or "topics". Each module also comes with a one-line summary of what it does; to list the modules whose summaries contain a given word such as "spam", type "modules spam". help>

Note that you now have a â€œhelp>â€ prompt instead of the â€œ>>>â€. When you are in help mode, you can explore the various modules, keywords and topics found in Python. Also note that when typing the word â€œmodulesâ€, you will see a delay as Python searches its library folder to acquire a list. If you have installed a lot of 3rd party modules, this can take quite a while, so be prepared to go fix yourself a mocha while you wait. Once it’s done, just follow the directions and play around with it and I think youâ€™ll get the gist.

The Python sys module

Yes, the title sounds like you are hissing if you read it out loud, but we are talking about Python here. Anyway, the main reason we care about Python’s sys module is because of all the things it can tell us about the Python environment. Just check out what it found on my machine:

>>> import sys >>> sys.executable 'L:\\Python24\\pythonw.exe' >>> sys.platform 'win32' >>> sys.version '2.4.3 (#69, Mar 29 2006, 17:35:34) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)]' >>> sys.argv [''] >>> sys.path ['L:\\Python24\\Lib\\idlelib', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages\\icalendar-1.2-py2.4.egg', 'C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\python24.zip', 'L:\\Python24', 'L:\\Python24\\DLLs', 'L:\\Python24\\lib', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\plat-win', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\lib-tk', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages\\win32', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages\\win32\\lib', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages\\Pythonwin', 'L:\\Python24\\lib\\site-packages\\wx-2.8-msw-unicode']

Just an FYI: I rarely use Python 2.4 nowadays. For some reason, it just happened to be the version of IDLE I had handy at the time of writing. Anyway, as you can see, the sys module is quite handy for figuring out stuff about your machine and Python itself. For example, you can use sys to add or remove paths from the path list that Python searches for modules when you type “import” by doing sys.path.add() or sys.path.remove().

Wrapping Up

Well, I hope you learned something from this article. My boss gave a lecture on introspection a couple years ago and I thought it was really interesting even though I knew about everything he was talking about. When I started writing this article, I decided to see if anyone else had written anything on this topic and the one with the most notoriety was an old article from 2002 by Patrick O’Brien (author of PyCrust). It’s much longer than this one, but quite interesting. If you have the time, I recommend reading it too.