[Python-Dev] dir, part 2 (original) (raw)

Georg Brandl g.brandl at gmx.net
Sat Nov 11 11:20:41 CET 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:

(what about vars(), btw?) Interesting question! Right now vars() and dir() don't seem to use the same set of keys; e.g.:

class C: pass ... c = C() c.foo = 42 vars(c) {'foo': 42} dir(c) ['doc', 'module', 'foo']

It makes some sense for vars(x) to return something like dict((name, getattr(x, name)) for name in dir(x) if hasattr(x, name)) and for the following equivalence to hold between vars() and dir() without args: dir() == sorted(vars().keys())

+1. This is easy and straightforward to explain, better than "With a module, class or class instance object as argument (or anything else that has a dict attribute), returns a dictionary corresponding to the object's symbol table."

Georg

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