Easy ways to investigate unknown Python APIs

Posted by jedi_coder on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by jedi_coder
Published on 2010-06-14T15:42:58Z Indexed on 2010/06/14 18:32 UTC
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When studying a snippet of unknown Python code, I occasionally bump into the

varName.methodName()

pattern.

To figure out what's this, I shall study the code more, find where varName was instantiated, find its type. So if varName proves to be an instance of ClassName class, I would knew that methodName() is a method of ClassName.

Sometimes varName == self and methodName() is a method of this class, or a method inherited from some other class, if the current class is subclassing some other classes.

Are there quick ways / tools that could take 'methodName' as input, scan over all installed Python modules and show which classes have methodName()?

The closest thing related to this I know of is ipython. If I type a class name, then dot ('.') then TAB, it can show the class members. Instead of a class I could use a name of an object (which is an instance of a certain class) and it would work too. As soon as I choose a method name from the provided options, I can type '?' or '??' and get some help if there's a docstring.

I wonder if ipython can do some intelligent scanning based only on 'methodName' string.

If you know alternatives to ipython that could possibly help with this, please do suggest them.

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