How to retrieve a variable's name in python at runtime?

Question

Is there a way to know, during run-time, a variable's name (from the code)? Or do variable's names forgotten during compilation (byte-code or not)?

e.g.:

>>>  vari = 15
>>>  print vari.~~name~~()
'vari'

Note: I'm talking about plain data-type variables (int, str, list etc.)

Answer 1

Variable names don't get forgotten, you can access variables (and look which variables you have) by introspection, e.g.

>>> i = 1
>>> locals()["i"]
1

However, because there are no pointers in Python, there's no way to reference a variable without actually writing its name. So if you wanted to print a variable name and its value, you could go via locals() or a similar function. ([i] becomes [1] and there's no way to retrieve the information that the 1 actually came from i.)

Answer 2

Variable names persist in the compiled code (that's how e.g. the dir built-in can work), but the mapping that's there goes from name to value, not vice versa. So if there are several variables all worth, for example, 23, there's no way to tell them from each other base only on the value 23 .

Answer 3

Here is a function I use to print the value of variables, it works for local as well as globals:

import sys
def print_var(var_name):
    calling_frame = sys._getframe().f_back
    var_val = calling_frame.f_locals.get(var_name, calling_frame.f_globals.get(var_name, None))
    print (var_name+':', str(var_val))

So the following code:

global_var = 123
def some_func():
    local_var = 456
    print_var("global_var")
    print_var("local_var")
    print_var("some_func")

some_func()

produces:

global_var: 123
local_var: 456
some_func: <function some_func at 0x10065b488>

Answer 4

here a basic (maybe weird) function that shows the name of its argument... the idea is to analyze code and search for the calls to the function (added in the init method it could help to find the instance name, although with a more complex code analysis)

def display(var):
    import inspect, re
    callingframe = inspect.currentframe().f_back
    cntext = "".join(inspect.getframeinfo(callingframe, 5)[3]) #gets 5 lines
    m = re.search("display\s+\(\s+(\w+)\s+\)", cntext, re.MULTILINE)
    print m.group(1), type(var), var

please note: getting multiple lines from the calling code helps in case the call was split as in the below example:

display(
        my_var
       )

but will produce unexpected result on this:

display(first_var)
display(second_var)

If you don't have control on the format of your project you can still improve the code to detect and manage different situations...

Overall I guess a static code analysis could produce a more reliable result, but I'm too lazy to check it now

Answer 5

This will work for simple data types (str, int, float, list etc.)

def my_print(var_str) :
    print var_str+':', globals()[var_str]

Answer 6

Nice easy solution using f-string formatting, which is native to Python 3.6 and later:

vari = 15
vari_name = f"{vari=}".split("=")[0]
print(vari_name)

Produces:

vari

Answer 7

You can do it, it's just not pretty.

import inspect, sys


def addVarToDict(d, variable):
    lineNumber = inspect.currentframe().f_back.f_lineno
    with open(sys.argv[0]) as f:
        lines = f.read().split("\n")

    line = lines[lineNumber-1]

    varName = line.split("addVarToDict")[1].split("(")[1].split(",")[1].split(")")[0].strip()
    d[varName] = variable


d = {}

a=1

print d # {}
addVarToDict(d,a)
print d # {'a': 1}

Answer 8

I tried the following link from the post above with no success: Googling returned this one.

http://pythonic.pocoo.org/2009/5/30/finding-objects-names

Answer 9

Just yesterday I saw a blog post with working code that does just this. Here's the link:

http://pyside.blogspot.com/2009/05/finding-objects-names.html