CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmodule
karlosss
karlosss

Reputation: 3155

Get the module a variable is defined in

When I define a class

class X:
    pass

I can then easily see the module name where the class is defined by doing X.__module__.

When I want to do the same for a variable

a = 5
a.__module__

I get an AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute '__module__'.

Is there any way how I can get the module name where a variable is defined?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 103

Answers (1)

pppery
pppery

Reputation: 3814

This is not possible because variables in Python are not separate objects. If you write a=5;a.__module__, that is treated exactly identically to (5).__module__, and that doesn't make any sense since you probably have multiple variables pointing to the integer 5.

This isn't really possible for classes either, for the same reason: X.__module__ actually returns the module in which the class was created, even if you create another variable referring to the class in a different module.

There are certain exotic situations in which this can in theory work, such as defining a class with a metaclass with a custom __prepare__ method, or if the code is being execed with a custom locals object, but those are very unusual and outside the scope of this answer.

Upvotes: 3

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