pyinspect 0.0.6

Find and inspect python functions

pyinspect

If, like me, when coding often you know which function you need but can't quite remember its name, then I have good news!. pyinspect is here to help you out.

pyinspect allows you to search for functions and class methods based on their name and prints out a handy table with all the functions that met your search criteria. You can also use pyinspect to print a function's code directly in your terminal so that you can remind yourself what it does without having to open any file!

Table of Contents

1. [Installing pyinspect](##Installing pyinspect)
2. ExamplFinding functionse2
3. Third Example
4. Fourth Example

Installing pyinspect

It's as simple as:

pip install pyinspect

Finding functions

The easiest way to grasp how pyinspect can help is with an example.

Imagine that you just can't remember which matplotlib.pyplot method you need to create a figure with subplots...

this is how you use pyinspect to find the function you need:

# import the module whose functions you're looking for
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# import pyinspect
import pyinspect

# Find the functions you're looking for
funcs = pyinspect.search(plt, name='subplot')

This results in a table with all the function's matching your search name:

note: search also looks for functions in sub-modules of the module found. e.g. search(matplotlib...) will look for methods across the entire matplotlib library!

pyinspect.find can also be used to find class attributes. For example, say that you're looking for a method with export in the name in rich.console.Console:

# import the class you need to inspect
from rich.console import Console

# import pyinspect
import pyinspect

# find class methods
methods = pyinspect.search(Console, 'export')

Which gives:

note: search also looks for methods matching your query among the parents of the class you passed. Use include_parents=False when calling search to restrict the search to just the class you've passed. Methods of the parent class are highlighted in a different color!

PRO TIP: if you don't pass a search name to pyinspect.search (e.g. pyinspect.find(Console)), pyinspect.search will print all functions and methods.

Inspecting functions

Okay, you've found the function you need, that's great. But how does it work?

What if, in addition to the exact name, you've forgotten which arguments it takes, or what it does exactly. Well, pyinspect can help you there as well! You can use pyinspect.print_function to print the source code of any function or attribute directly in your terminal. This way you can inspect what the function does without having to open any file!

This is how to do it:

# import pyinspect
import pyinspect as pi

# Look at how pyinspect.search works
pi.showme(pi.search)

which yields:

Tracebacks

Finally, pyinspect builds upon rich's awesome traceback functionality to print nicely formatted tracebacks and show the local variables when the exception came up.

E.g.:

# import pyinspect and install the traceback handler
import pi

pi.install_traceback()  # use hide_locals=True to hide locals panels

# make some buggy code
import numpy as np

a = np.ones(5)
b = "ignore this"  # a local variable not being used
c = np.zeros(4)  # ooops, wrong size

a + c  # this will give an error

and this is the traceback:

note: although we defined three variables (a, b, c) only two where in the line causing the error (a + c). pyinspect then highlights a and c in the traceback as this is what you need to know to fix your bug. If you want pyinspect to only show the variables in the error line pass relevant_only=True to pi.install_traceback()

pro tips:

• if you want to show all items in the local scope (e.g. also imported modules, not just variables) then you can use all_locals=True in pi.install_traceback()
• if you don't want the locals to be shown at all, then use hide_locals=True
• if you want more or less extensive tracebacks, you can use keep_frames to decide how many frames to shown in nested tracebacks (i.e when a function a calls a function b and the error comes up in b, do you want to see only the locals in b or in a and b?)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Start a pull request if you have a change you'd like to submit or open an issue to report a bug or request a new feature to be added to pyinspect

Aknowledgements

pyinspect is mostly a thin wrapper on top of the awesome rich library, so a huge thank you goes to @willmcgugan for the great job done with rich.