What is the Python equivalent of Ruby's "inspect"?

Question

I just want to quickly see the properties and values of an object in Python, how do I do that in the terminal on a mac (very basic stuff, never used python)?

Specifically, I want to see what message.attachments are in this Google App Engine MailHandler example (images, videos, docs, etc.).

Answer 1

Update

There are better ways to do this than dir. See other answers.

Original Answer

Use the built in function dir(fp) to see the attributes of fp.

Answer 2

use the getmembers attribute of the inspect module

It will return a list of (key, value) tuples. It gets the value from obj.__dict__ if available and uses getattr if the the there is no corresponding entry in obj.__dict__. It can save you from writing a few lines of code for this purpose.

Answer 3

If you want to dump the entire object, you can use the pprint module to get a pretty-printed version of it.

from pprint import pprint

pprint(my_object)

# If there are many levels of recursion, and you don't want to see them all
# you can use the depth parameter to limit how many levels it goes down
pprint(my_object, depth=2)

Edit: I may have misread what you meant by 'object' - if you're wanting to look at class instances, as opposed to basic data structures like dicts, you may want to look at the inspect module instead.