Better dir

The builtin dir command is very useful. However it does not help that much when an object has many attributes.

I have a little function called la in my $HOME/.pythonrc.py

def la(obj, key=None, ignore_case=1):
    '''List all attributes of object'''
    import re
    if key:
        if ignore_case:
            flags = re.I
        else:
            flags = 0
        func = re.compile(key, flags).search

    else:
        func = None
    print "\n".join(filter(func, dir(obj)))

This prints the attributes of an object one per line and also gives you the ability to search for specific items.

>>> from user import la
>>> import wx
>>> la(wx, "open")
ART_FILE_OPEN
ART_FOLDER_OPEN
EVT_MENU_OPEN
ID_OPEN
OPEN
Process_Open
wxEVT_MENU_OPEN
>>> 

(Sun Aug 27 14:03:24 JDT 2006: Added regular expression to "la")