pdir: Selective & Pretty dir() printing utlity

dir() is a very useful utility function in python which returns a list of names comprising the attributes of the given object, and of attributes reachable from it. However, a lot many times all those names can be bugging. Say you are really interested in knowing only the useful methods a Python “list” offers. And you do not like the unreadable, unfiltered mess resulting from using “dir(list)”.

Then pdir should be very useful for you. I wrote this bit because something like this is very helpful to me, who forgets some of the important functions a namespace offers; and likes reading clean pretty stuff.

Quickstart

You can use import the pdir function from pdir after installing this package, and consider it as your new dir() friend.

An example:

>>> from pdir import pdir
>>> from collections import list
>>> pdir(list)
['append',
 'count',
 'extend',
 'index',
 'insert',
 'pop',
 'remove',
 'reverse',
 'sort']

Now lets compare this with what dir() prints:

>>> dir(list)
['__add__', '__class__', .........................................................
..................................................................................
'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove', 'reverse', 'sort']

Some of the elements are substituted with dots (…) here.

Wasn’t the former clean and better?

Notes

• pdir is essentially a wrapper around the existing dir function.

• I will be trying to add interesting regular expressions support to further filter out pdir results.

• Anyone who is interested in the code can see it ‘here’_ Its at its very rudimentary stage of development and may be unstable.