jerryji wrote: > Sorry for this newbie question, I was puzzled why the existing > property of an object is not shown in the dir() function output.
The under-development version of Python (2.6) allows for a __dir__ magic method by which the class implementer can return whatever he wishes from a dir (). This is to help, for example, modules like my WMI one which makes heavy use of __getattr__ magic to proxy across Windows COM attributes. This, in turn, helps editors and IDEs which can provide popup lists of attributes etc. All that said, I don't believe it takes any automatic account of properties. TJG <noddy code example> class X (object): def __init__ (self, a): self.a = a print dir (X (1)) def __dir__ (self): return ['x', 'y', 'z'] X.__dir__ = __dir__ print dir (X (2)) </code> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list