Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Inspection


Being a powerful dynamic language, Python allows us to change its runtime behavior based on the state of objects it's working with.

Inspecting the state of objects is the foundation of every dynamic language, and the standard library inspect module has most of the features needed for such a case.

How to do it...

For this recipe, the following steps are to be performed:

  1. Based on the inspect module, we can quickly create a helper function that will tell us major object properties and type for most objects:
import inspect

def inspect_object(o):
    if inspect.isfunction(o) or inspect.ismethod(o):
        print('FUNCTION, arguments:', inspect.signature(o))
    elif inspect.isclass(o):
        print('CLASS, methods:', 
              inspect.getmembers(o, inspect.isfunction))
    else:
        print('OBJECT ({}): {}'.format(
            o.__class__, 
            [(n, v) for n, v in inspect.getmembers(o) 
                if not n.startswith('__')]
        ))
  1. Then, if we apply it to any object...