CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonintrospection
user541686
user541686

Reputation: 210485

Removing the redundancy in Python's 'print' with introspection

Often I find myself doing something like this when debugging:

print a.foo, b.bar, c.baz

It prints something like

1 3 4

which is correct but not as useful as it could be.
What I ideally want to be printed is something like:

a.foo: 1, b.bar: 3, c.baz: 4

which is easily accomplished via

print 'a.foo:', a.foo, 'b.bar:', b.bar, 'c.baz:', c.baz

but now I'm writing the same thing twice!

Can I use some kind of Python trick like introspection to avoid repeating myself?
I'm imagining a magical printexp like this:

printexp('a.foo', 'b.bar', 'c.baz')

but I'm not familiar with Python's introspection capabilities so I'm not sure how to go about doing this.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 68

Answers (2)

Dolda2000
Dolda2000

Reputation: 25855

This is not exactly what you asked for, but if you want to do this with "ordinary" objects (by which I mean objects of user-defined classes), you may want to simply do this:

print a.__dict__

Upvotes: 0

user541686
user541686

Reputation: 210485

I figured it out myself:

>>> def printexp(*exps, **kwargs):
    import sys
    import inspect
    import itertools
    locs = dict(inspect.currentframe().f_back.f_locals)
    locs.setdefault('_file', kwargs['file'] if 'file' in kwargs else sys.stdout)
    exec('print' + ' ' + '>>' + '_file' + ', ' + (', ' + '_file' + '.write(",")' + ' or ').join(map(lambda exp: '"' + exp.replace('"', '\\"') + ':' + '"' + ', ' + exp, exps)) + '', None, locs)

>>> x = 5
>>> printexp('x', 'x')
x: 5, x: 5

Upvotes: 1

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