Every so often I have an object defined in some Python code and I want to work out in which file that object was defined.

Generally this can be done by a bit of grepping but if the object name in question is pretty generic this can be less than productive and it turns out there is a nice ready made way provided for us in the Python Standard Library.

So as an example currently I’m working with Pyro4 and I’m curious to know, for instance, where a particular constant, VERSION, is defined.

>>> import Pyro4
>>> print Pyro4.constants.VERSION
4.8

Well the ‘inspect’ module from the Python standard library allows you do just that, specifically the ‘getfile’ method – http://docs.python.org/library/inspect.html#inspect.getfile

>>> inspect.getfile(Pyro4.constants)
'C:\\Python27\\lib\\site-packages\\pyro4-4.8-py2.7.egg\\Pyro4\\constants.pyc'

As we can now see the VERSION object derives from the constants.pyc at the path given. In this case the definition is actually in the middle of an egg, pyro4-4.8-py2.7.egg,  which  means direct access to the underlying source code is not as straightforward as if it were implemented in plain old python scripts.

Nevertheless we can still make use of another inspect module function, the ‘getsource’ method (http://docs.python.org/library/inspect.html#inspect.getsource) to get some more information about the object we’re interested in as follows:

>>> inspect.getsource(Pyro4.constants)
'"""\nDefinitions of various hard coded constants.
Pyro - Python Remote Objects.  Copyright by Irmen de Jong.
irmen@razorvine.net - http://www.razorvine.net/projects/Pyro"""
# Pyro version\nVERSION = "4.8"
# standard object name for the Daemon object
DAEMON_NAME = "Pyro.Daemon"
# standard name for the Name server itself
NAMESERVER_NAME = "Pyro.NameServer"

… etc, etc.

The Python dict() constructor

Summary

How to add key/value pairs to an existing dictionary using the dict() contstructor

Using dict()

I’ve fallen into the habit of building dictionaries in Python using the braces approach, that is :

d1 = {'name':'Jane', 'age':21}


I was reminded today that you can use the conventional constructor method associated with the dict type as follows :

d1 = dict(name='Jane', age=21)

This will produce the same dictionary as the previous example. Notice that name of the keyword arguments (‘name’ and ‘age’) end up being the keys of the dictionary. Notice also that because they are keyword arguments to the function dict() they are not supplied as quoted strings.

What I learnt today

I was looking at some code today and discovered there’s something else the dict() function can do which I didn’t previously know of. If you have an existing dictionary which you wish to add some key/value pairs to you can do this.

#Create d1 from above
d1 = dict(name='Jane', age=21)

print d2
{'age': 21, 'shoesize': 7, 'name': 'Jane', 'weight': 50}

Taking it further

Not surprisingly you can use the same technique to modify the existing key/value pairs in a dictionary, like this :

#Create d1 from above
d1 = dict(name='Jane', age=21)

print d3
{'age': 21, 'name': 'John'}