Every function is a fully-fledged object and, as such, they have many attributes. Some of them are special and can be used in an introspective way to inspect the function object at runtime. The following script is an example that shows all of them and how to display their value for an example function:
func.attributes.py
def multiplication(a, b=1):
"""Return a multiplied by b. """
return a * b
special_attributes = [
"__doc__", "__name__", "__qualname__", "__module__",
"__defaults__", "__code__", "__globals__", "__dict__",
"__closure__", "__annotations__", "__kwdefaults__",
]
for attribute in special_attributes:
print(attribute, '->', getattr(multiplication, attribute))
I used the built-in getattr
function to get the value of those attributes. getattr(obj, attribute)
is equivalent to obj.attribute
and comes in handy when we need to get an attribute at runtime using its string name. Running this script yields:
$ python func.attributes.py __doc__ -> Return a multiplied by b. __name__ -> multiplication __qualname__ -> multiplication __module__ -> __main__ __defaults__ -> (1,) __code__ -> <code object multiplication at 0x7ff529e79300, file "ch4/func.attributes.py", line 1> __globals__ -> {... omitted ...} __dict__ -> {} __closure__ -> None __annotations__ -> {} __kwdefaults__ -> None
I have omitted the value of the __globals__
attribute, it was too big. An explanation of the meaning of this attribute can be found in the types section of the Python Data Model documentation page.