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I have a class named Article in my project. I want to find all its methods that are unused in the project. For a particular method I can press Alt+F7 and see where it's used, and if it's not used anywhere, I can delete it safely. Is it possible to automate the process and find all methods of the class that are unused without pressing Alt+F7 for each method?

Sergey Filkin
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1 Answers1

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PyCharm doesn't offer this feature since it isn't possible to reliably determine that a method is unused, because there are simply too many ways to call it dynamically.

But you may use Vulture to find most of dead code in a project. Refer to the following commands:

$ pip install -U vulture
$ vulture path_of_project
$ # Use --exclude for excluding particular files (e.g. virtualenv files)
$ vulture --exclude=env path_of_project
Rahul Jha
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JDownloader
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    Awesome package name. See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/693070/how-can-you-find-unused-functions-in-python-code – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Mar 27 '17 at 15:02
  • I just tried this out on a version 2.7 codebase, and it's not picking up completely unreferenced class methods, but giving them a 60% confidence; so Vulture does not get a very high score in my situation. Your mileage may vary. It's still a good pointer, but for me, Vulture merely gives hints. –  Oct 31 '19 at 11:37