Accessing Object Memory Address

The Python manual has this to say about id():

Return the "identity'' of an object. This is an integer (or long integer) which is guaranteed to be unique and constant for this object during its lifetime. Two objects with non-overlapping lifetimes may have the same id() value. (Implementation note: this is the address of the object.)

So in CPython, this will be the address of the object. No such guarantee for any other Python interpreter, though.

Note that if you're writing a C extension, you have full access to the internals of the Python interpreter, including access to the addresses of objects directly.

You could reimplement the default repr this way:

def __repr__(self):
    return '<%s.%s object at %s>' % (
        self.__class__.__module__,
        self.__class__.__name__,
        hex(id(self))
    )

Just use

id(object)

Just in response to Torsten, I wasn't able to call addressof() on a regular python object. Furthermore, id(a) != addressof(a). This is in CPython, don't know about anything else.

>>> from ctypes import c_int, addressof
>>> a = 69
>>> addressof(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: invalid type
>>> b = c_int(69)
>>> addressof(b)
4300673472
>>> id(b)
4300673392

You can get something suitable for that purpose with:

id(self)

With ctypes, you can achieve the same thing with

>>> import ctypes
>>> a = (1,2,3)
>>> ctypes.addressof(a)
3077760748L

Documentation:

addressof(C instance) -> integer
Return the address of the C instance internal buffer

Note that in CPython, currently id(a) == ctypes.addressof(a), but ctypes.addressof should return the real address for each Python implementation, if

• ctypes is supported
• memory pointers are a valid notion.

Edit: added information about interpreter-independence of ctypes

I know this is an old question but if you're still programming, in python 3 these days... I have actually found that if it is a string, then there is a really easy way to do this:

>>> spam.upper
<built-in method upper of str object at 0x1042e4830>
>>> spam.upper()
'YO I NEED HELP!'
>>> id(spam)
4365109296

string conversion does not affect location in memory either:

>>> spam = {437 : 'passphrase'}
>>> object.__repr__(spam)
'<dict object at 0x1043313f0>'
>>> str(spam)
"{437: 'passphrase'}"
>>> object.__repr__(spam)
'<dict object at 0x1043313f0>'

You can get the memory address/location of any object by using the 'partition' method of the built-in 'str' type.

Here is an example of using it to get the memory address of an object:

Python 3.8.3 (default, May 27 2020, 02:08:17)
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> object.__repr__(1)
'<int object at 0x7ca70923f0>'
>>> hex(int(object.__repr__(1).partition('object at ')[2].strip('>'), 16))
0x7ca70923f0
>>>

Here, I am using the built-in 'object' class' '__repr__' method with an object/item such as 1 as an argument to return the string and then I am partitioning that string which will return a tuple of the string before the string that I provided, the string that I provided and then the string after the string that I provided, and as the memory location is positioned after 'object at', I can get the memory address as it has partitioned it from that part.

And then as the memory address was returned as the third item in the returned tuple, I can access it with index 2 from the tuple. But then, it has a right angled bracket as a suffix in the string that I obtained, so I use the 'strip' function to remove it, which will return it without the angled bracket. I then transformed the resulted string into an integer with base 16 and then turn it into a hex number.

While it's true that id(object) gets the object's address in the default CPython implementation, this is generally useless... you can't do anything with the address from pure Python code.

The only time you would actually be able to use the address is from a C extension library... in which case it is trivial to get the object's address since Python objects are always passed around as C pointers.

If the __repr__ is overloaded, you may consider __str__ to see the memory address of the variable.

Here is the details of __repr__ versus __str__ by Moshe Zadka in StackOverflow.