Martin Durkin a écrit , le 02.07.2007 06:38: > This is an interesting point to me. I am just learning Python and I > wonder how I would know that a built in function already exists? > At what point do I stop searching for a ready made solution to a > particular problem and start programming my own function? > Is it just a matter of reading *all* the documentation before I start > coding?
The answer from another beginner like me is: dir() Try it out interactively (my example with Python 2.4): --------------------------------------- >>> dir() ['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__'] >>> __builtins__ <module '__builtin__' (built-in)> >>> dir(__builtins__) ['ArithmeticError', 'AssertionError', 'AttributeError', 'DeprecationWarning', 'EOFError', 'Ellipsis', 'EnvironmentError', 'Exception', 'False', 'FloatingPointError', 'FutureWarning', 'IOError', 'ImportError', 'IndentationError', 'IndexError', 'KeyError', 'KeyboardInterrupt', 'LookupError', 'MemoryError', 'NameError', 'None', 'NotImplemented', 'NotImplementedError', 'OSError', 'OverflowError', 'OverflowWarning', 'PendingDeprecationWarning', 'ReferenceError', 'RuntimeError', 'RuntimeWarning', 'StandardError', 'StopIteration', 'SyntaxError', 'SyntaxWarning', 'SystemError', 'SystemExit', 'TabError', 'True', 'TypeError', 'UnboundLocalError', 'UnicodeDecodeError', 'UnicodeEncodeError', 'UnicodeError', 'UnicodeTranslateError', 'UserWarning', 'ValueError', 'Warning', 'ZeroDivisionError', '_', '__debug__', '__doc__', '__import__', '__name__', 'abs', 'apply', 'basestring', 'bool', 'buffer', 'callable', 'chr', 'classmethod', 'cmp', 'coerce', 'compile', 'complex', 'copyright', 'credits', 'delattr', 'dict', 'dir', 'divmod', 'enumerate', 'eval', 'execfile', 'exit', 'file', 'filter', 'float', 'frozenset', 'getattr', 'globals', 'hasattr', 'hash', 'help', 'hex', 'id', 'input', 'int', 'intern', 'isinstance', 'issubclass', 'iter', 'len', 'license', 'list', 'locals', 'long', 'map', 'max', 'min', 'object', 'oct', 'open', 'ord', 'pow', 'property', 'quit', 'range', 'raw_input', 'reduce', 'reload', 'repr', 'reversed', 'round', 'set', 'setattr', 'slice', 'sorted', 'staticmethod', 'str', 'sum', 'super', 'tuple', 'type', 'unichr', 'unicode', 'vars', 'xrange', 'zip'] >>> reversed <type 'reversed'> >>> dir(reversed) ['__class__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__iter__', '__len__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'next'] >>> print reversed.__doc__ reversed(sequence) -> reverse iterator over values of the sequence Return a reverse iterator --------------------------------------- Far from me the idea that manuals are useless, but this is a nice thing about Python that you can look at what is available interactively. Cheers Jan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
