How to "see" the structure of an object in python

Question

I am wokring in python 2.7. I have been experimenting with the tweepy package. There is an object called the tweepy.models.status object, whose function is defined here: https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy/blob/master/tweepy/models.py. I have a function that looks like this: ``` def on_status(self, status): try: print status return True except Exception, e: print >> sys.stderr, 'Encountered Exception:', e pass ``` The object I am referring to is the one returned from the `on_status` function, called `status`. When the `print status` line executes i get this printed on the screen; tweepy.models.Status object at 0x85d32ec> My question is actually pretty generic. I want to know how to visually print out the contents of this `status` object? I want to know what information is available inside this object. I tried the `for i, v in status :` approach, but it says this objects is not iterable. Also not all of the object attributes are described in the function definition. Thanks a lot!

Accepted Answer

You could iterate over `status.__dict__.items()`:

```
for k,v in status.__dict__.items():  #same thing as `vars(status)`
    print k,v
```

The above approach won't work if the class uses `__slots__` and doesn't have a slot for `__dict__`. Classes with `__slots__` are quite rare though, so it's unlikely to be a problem.

Alternatively, you could use the `dir` builtin with `getattr`:

```
for attr in dir(status):
    print attr, getattr(status,attr)
```

This does work for classes with `__slots__`, but has some limitations if a custom `__getattr__` is defined (see link, and `__dict__` would suffer in the same way).

Finally, if you want really fine control over what you see (e.g. if you only want methods), you can check out some of the goodies in the `inspect` module.

How to "see" the structure of an object in python

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