pyinspect 0.0.4

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.

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 it:

# 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:

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. Pass include_parents=False when calling search to restrict the search to just the class you've passed.

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

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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 how it works 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:

# import the class you're using
from rich.console import Console


# import pyinspect
import pyinspect

# Print a function's source code
pyinspect.print_function(Console.export_text)

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 pyinspect
pyinspect.install_traceback()

# make some buggy code
import numpy as np

def sum(a, b):
    return a + b

a = np.ones(5)
b = np.zeros(4)

sum(a, b)

and this is the traceback:

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.