Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote: > Michael Yanowitz wrote: > > Hello: > > > > Many times, people are warning things like > > "Don't use 'str' as a variable name as it will shadow the > > built in str function." > > Is there some way to determine if a string is already > > defined in some higher scope? > > Maybe something like > > <code> > > > > if isdefined ('str'): > > print 'str is already defined, please choose another name' > > > > > You might check out globals() which returns a dictionary of everything: > > Python 2.2 (#1, Mar 26 2002, 15:46:04) > [GCC 2.95.3 20010315 (SuSE)] on linux2 > Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. > >>> globals() > {'__builtins__': <module '__builtin__' (built-in)>, '__name__': > '__main__', '__doc__': None} > >>> blah = None > >>> globals() > {'__builtins__': <module '__builtin__' (built-in)>, '__name__': > '__main__', '__doc__': None, 'blah': None} > > #Taking this a step further, this is a dictionary so you can use the > has_key method or try to access the dict and catch an exception should > the key not exist > > >>> if globals().has_key('blah'): > ... print "I have blah" > ... > I have blah > > > -carl > > > -- > > Carl J. Van Arsdall > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Build and Release > MontaVista Software
There's also the dir() function: >>> dir() ['__builtins__', '__doc__', '__name__'] >>> 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', 'WindowsError', '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'] >>> dir(__name__) ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill'] >>> dir(__doc__) ['__class__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__str__'] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list