Re: Function that knows its argument's variable name

[Tino Wildenhain]

Hi,

Am 14.03.2010 12:58, schrieb Helge Stenström:

I want to write  function that prints a value of a variable, for
debugging. Like:

with

myVariable = "parrot"
otherVariable = "dead"

probe(myVariable)
probe(otherVariable)

instead of the longer

print "myVariable = ", myVariable
print "otherVariable = ", otherVariable

Is that even possible?

The function would look like

def probe(var):
     nameOfVar = someMagic(var)
     print nameOfVar, " = ", var

but can someMagic(var) find the variable name? Is that possible?

apart from very hackery, why don't you just use:

def probe(**vars):
    for varname,value in vars.items():
        print "%s = %r" % (varname,value)

and call it like that:

probe(myvar="foo")
probe(othervar="bar")

or even

probe(myvar=myvar) (if myvar was assigned before)

please note introspective approaches have a very narrow field
where they can work - as already shown in other posts: you can have
values w/o names and also more then one name to a value (or object).

Regards
Tino Wildenhain

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