xotl.tools.future.inspect - Inspect live objects

This module extends the standard library’s functools. You may use it as a drop-in replacement in many cases.

Avoid importing * from this module since could be different in Python 2.7 and Python 3.3.

We added the following features.

xotl.tools.future.inspect.get_attr_value(obj, name, *default)

Get a named attribute from an object in a safe way.

Similar to getattr but without triggering dynamic look-up via the descriptor protocol, __getattr__ or __getattribute__ by using getattr_static().

We have backported several Python 3.3 features but maybe not all (some protected structures are not presented in this documentation).

xotl.tools.future.inspect.getfullargspec(func)

Get the names and default values of a callable object’s parameters.

A tuple of seven things is returned: (args, varargs, varkw, defaults, kwonlyargs, kwonlydefaults, annotations). ‘args’ is a list of the parameter names. ‘varargs’ and ‘varkw’ are the names of the * and ** parameters or None. ‘defaults’ is an n-tuple of the default values of the last n parameters. ‘kwonlyargs’ is a list of keyword-only parameter names. ‘kwonlydefaults’ is a dictionary mapping names from kwonlyargs to defaults. ‘annotations’ is a dictionary mapping parameter names to annotations.

Notable differences from inspect.signature():

• the “self” parameter is always reported, even for bound methods
• wrapper chains defined by __wrapped__ not unwrapped automatically

xotl.tools.future.inspect.getattr_static(obj, attr, default=<object object>)

Retrieve attributes without triggering dynamic lookup via the descriptor protocol, __getattr__ or __getattribute__.

Note: this function may not be able to retrieve all attributes that getattr can fetch (like dynamically created attributes) and may find attributes that getattr can’t (like descriptors that raise AttributeError). It can also return descriptor objects instead of instance members in some cases. See the documentation for details.