Find the Python code for specified symbols
Project description
symbex
Find the Python code for specified symbols
Installation
Install this tool using pip
:
pip install symbex
Usage
symbex
can search for names of functions and classes that occur at the top level of a Python file.
To search every .py
file in your current directory and all subdirectories, run like this:
symbex my_function
You can search for more than one symbol at a time:
symbex my_function MyClass
Wildcards are supported - to search for every test_
function run this (note the single quotes to avoid the shell interpreting the *
as a wildcard):
symbex 'test_*'
To search for methods within classes, use class.method
notation:
symbex Entry.get_absolute_url
Wildcards are supported here as well:
symbex 'Entry.*'
symbex '*.get_absolute_url'
symbex '*.get_*'
Or to view every method of every class:
symbex '*.*'
To search within a specific file, pass that file using the -f
option. You can pass this more than once to search multiple files.
symbex MyClass -f my_file.py
To search within a specific directory and all of its subdirectories, use the -d
option:
symbex Database -d ~/projects/datasette
If symbex
encounters any Python code that it cannot parse, it will print a warning message and continue searching:
# Syntax error in path/badcode.py: expected ':' (<unknown>, line 1)
Pass --silent
to suppress these warnings:
symbex MyClass --silent
Example output
In a fresh checkout of Datasette I ran this command:
symbex MessagesDebugView get_long_description
Here's the output of the command:
# File: setup.py Line: 5
def get_long_description():
with open(
os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__)), "README.md"),
encoding="utf8",
) as fp:
return fp.read()
# File: datasette/views/special.py Line: 60
class PatternPortfolioView(View):
async def get(self, request, datasette):
await datasette.ensure_permissions(request.actor, ["view-instance"])
return Response.html(
await datasette.render_template(
"patterns.html",
request=request,
view_name="patterns",
)
)
Just the signatures
The -s/--signatures
option will list just the signatures of the functions and classes, for example:
symbex -s -d symbex
# File: symbex/cli.py Line: 37
def cli(symbols, files, directories, signatures, silent)
# File: symbex/lib.py Line: 150
def class_definition(class_def)
# File: symbex/lib.py Line: 32
def code_for_node(code: str, node: AST, class_name: str, signatures: bool)
# File: symbex/lib.py Line: 63
def match(name: str, symbols) -> bool
# File: symbex/lib.py Line: 8
def find_symbol_nodes(code: str, symbols)
# File: symbex/lib.py Line: 88
def function_definition(function_node: AST)
This can be combined with other options, or you can run symbex -s
to see every symbol in the current directory and its subdirectories.
Using with LLM
This tool is primarily designed to be used with LLM, a CLI tool for working with Large Language Models.
symbex
makes it easy to grab a specific class or function and pass it to the llm
command.
For example, I ran this in the Datasette repository root:
symbex Response | llm --system 'Explain this code, succinctly'
And got back this:
This code defines a custom
Response
class with methods for returning HTTP responses. It includes methods for setting cookies, returning HTML, text, and JSON responses, and redirecting to a different URL. Theasgi_send
method sends the response to the client using the ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) protocol.
Development
To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:
cd symbex
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:
pip install -e '.[test]'
To run the tests:
pytest
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