How do I look inside a Python object?

Python has a strong set of introspection features.

Take a look at the following built-in functions:

• type()
• dir()
• id()
• getattr()
• hasattr()
• globals()
• locals()
• callable()

type() and dir() are particularly useful for inspecting the type of an object and its set of attributes, respectively.

object.__dict__

I'm surprised no one's mentioned help yet!

In [1]: def foo():
   ...:     "foo!"
   ...:

In [2]: help(foo)
Help on function foo in module __main__:

foo()
    foo!

Help lets you read the docstring and get an idea of what attributes a class might have, which is pretty helpful.

First, read the source.

Second, use the dir() function.

If this is for exploration to see what's going on, I'd recommend looking at IPython. This adds various shortcuts to obtain an objects documentation, properties and even source code. For instance appending a "?" to a function will give the help for the object (effectively a shortcut for "help(obj)", wheras using two ?'s ("func??") will display the sourcecode if it is available.

There are also a lot of additional conveniences, like tab completion, pretty printing of results, result history etc. that make it very handy for this sort of exploratory programming.

For more programmatic use of introspection, the basic builtins like dir(), vars(), getattr etc will be useful, but it is well worth your time to check out the inspect module. To fetch the source of a function, use "inspect.getsource" eg, applying it to itself:

>>> print inspect.getsource(inspect.getsource)
def getsource(object):
    """Return the text of the source code for an object.

    The argument may be a module, class, method, function, traceback, frame,
    or code object.  The source code is returned as a single string.  An
    IOError is raised if the source code cannot be retrieved."""
    lines, lnum = getsourcelines(object)
    return string.join(lines, '')

inspect.getargspec is also frequently useful if you're dealing with wrapping or manipulating functions, as it will give the names and default values of function parameters.

You can list the attributes of a object with dir() in the shell:

>>> dir(object())
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__']

Of course, there is also the inspect module: http://docs.python.org/library/inspect.html#module-inspect

"""Visit http://diveintopython.net/"""

__author__ = "Mark Pilgrim (mark@diveintopython.org)"


def info(object, spacing=10, collapse=1):
    """Print methods and doc strings.

    Takes module, class, list, dictionary, or string."""
    methodList = [e for e in dir(object) if callable(getattr(object, e))]
    processFunc = collapse and (lambda s: " ".join(s.split())) or (lambda s: s)
    print "\n".join(["%s %s" %
                     (method.ljust(spacing),
                      processFunc(str(getattr(object, method).__doc__)))
                     for method in methodList])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print help.__doc__

Others have already mentioned the dir() built-in which sounds like what you're looking for, but here's another good tip. Many libraries -- including most of the standard library -- are distributed in source form. Meaning you can pretty easily read the source code directly. The trick is in finding it; for example:

>>> import string
>>> string.__file__
'/usr/lib/python2.5/string.pyc'

The *.pyc file is compiled, so remove the trailing 'c' and open up the uncompiled *.py file in your favorite editor or file viewer:

/usr/lib/python2.5/string.py

I've found this incredibly useful for discovering things like which exceptions are raised from a given API. This kind of detail is rarely well-documented in the Python world.

If you want to look at parameters and methods, as others have pointed out you may well use pprint or dir()

If you want to see the actual value of the contents, you can do

object.__dict__

There is a very cool tool called objexplore. Here is a simple example on how to use its explore function on a pandas DataFrame.

import pandas as pd
df=pd.read_csv('https://storage.googleapis.com/download.tensorflow.org/data/heart.csv')

from objexplore import explore
explore(df)

Will pop up the following in your shell:

pprint and dir together work great

If you are interested to see the source code of the function corresponding to the object myobj, you can type in iPython or Jupyter Notebook:

myobj??

In Python 3.8, you can print out the contents of an object by using the __dict__. For example,

class Person():
   pass

person = Person()

## set attributes
person.first = 'Oyinda'
person.last = 'David'

## to see the content of the object
print(person.__dict__)  

{"first": "Oyinda", "last": "David"}

If you are looking for a slightly more delicate solution, you could try objprint. A positive side of it is that it can handle nested objects. For example:

from objprint import objprint

class Position:
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

class Player:
    def __init__(self):
        self.name = "Alice"
        self.age = 18
        self.items = ["axe", "armor"]
        self.coins = {"gold": 1, "silver": 33, "bronze": 57}
        self.position = Position(3, 5)

objprint(Player())

Will print out

<Player
  .name = 'Alice',
  .age = 18,
  .items = ['axe', 'armor'],
  .coins = {'gold': 1, 'silver': 33, 'bronze': 57},
  .position = <Position
    .x = 3,
    .y = 5
  >
>

In addition if you want to look inside list and dictionaries, you can use pprint()

Many good tipps already, but the shortest and easiest (not necessarily the best) has yet to be mentioned:

object?

Try using:

print(object.stringify())

• where object is the variable name of the object you are trying to inspect.

This prints out a nicely formatted and tabbed output showing all the hierarchy of keys and values in the object.

NOTE: This works in python3. Not sure if it works in earlier versions

UPDATE: This doesn't work on all types of objects. If you encounter one of those types (like a Request object), use one of the following instead:

• dir(object())

or

import pprint then: pprint.pprint(object.__dict__)