pyinspect (find functions when you can’t remember their name) ¶

Annouce ¶

Description ¶

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.

You can also use pyinspect to print a function’s code directly in your terminal so that you can remind yourself what it does without having to open any file!

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 the function you need:

           # 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 a table with all the function’s matching your search name:

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')

          

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 what it does 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 directly in your terminal.

This way you can inspect what the function does without having to open any file!

This is how to do it:

           # import pyinspect
import pyinspect as pi

# Look at how pyinspect.search works
pi.showme(pi.search)

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 pi

pi.install_traceback()  # use hide_locals=True to hide locals panels

# make some buggy code
import numpy as np

a = np.ones(5)
b = "ignore this"  # a local variable not being used
c = np.zeros(4)  # ooops, wrong size

a + c  # this will give an error

          

pro tips ¶

if you want to show all items in the local scope (e.g. also imported modules, not just variables) then you can use all_locals=True in pi.install_traceback() if you don’t want the locals to be shown at all, then use hide_locals=True if you want more or less extensive tracebacks, you can use keep_frames to decide how many frames to shown in nested tracebacks (i.e when a function a calls a function b and the error comes up in b, do you want to see only the locals in b or in a and b?)

Acknowledgements ¶

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.