How to get a complete list of object's methods and attributes?

Question

dir(re.compile(pattern))

does not return pattern as one of the lists's elements. Namely it returns:

['__copy__', '__deepcopy__', 'findall', 'finditer', 'match', 'scanner', 'search', 'split', 'sub', 'subn']

According to the manual, it is supposed to contain

the object's attributes' names, the names of its class's attributes, and recursively of the attributes of its class's base classes.

It says also that

The list is not necessarily complete.

Is there a way to get the complete list? I always assumed that dir returns a complete list but apparently it does not...

Also: is there a way to list only attributes? Or only methods?

Edit: this is actually a bug in python -> supposedly it is fixed in the 3.0 branch (and perhaps also in 2.6)

Answer 1

For the complete list of attributes, the short answer is: no. The problem is that the attributes are actually defined as the arguments accepted by the getattr built-in function. As the user can reimplement __getattr__ and suddenly allowing any kind of attribute, there is no possible generic way to generate that list. The dir function return the keys in the __dict__ attribute, i.e. all the attributes accessible if the __getattr__ method is not reimplemented.

For the second question, it does not really make sens. Actually, methods are callable attributes, nothing more. You could though filter callable attributes, and, using the inspect module determine the class methods, methods or function.

Answer 2

That is why the new __dir__() method has been added in python 2.6

see:

• http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html#other-language-changes (scroll down a little bit)
• http://bugs.python.org/issue1591665