How do I get list of methods in a Python class?

Question

I want to iterate through the methods in a class, or handle class or instance objects differently based on the methods present. How do I get a list of class methods?

Also see:

• How can I list the methods in a Python 2.5 module?
• Looping over a Python / IronPython Object Methods
• Finding the methods an object has
• How do I look inside a Python object?
• How Do I Perform Introspection on an Object in Python 2.x?
• How to get a complete list of object’s methods and attributes?
• Finding out which functions are available from a class instance in python?

Answer 1

An example (listing the methods of the optparse.OptionParser class):

>>> from optparse import OptionParser
>>> import inspect
#python2
>>> inspect.getmembers(OptionParser, predicate=inspect.ismethod)
[([('__init__', <unbound method OptionParser.__init__>),
...
 ('add_option', <unbound method OptionParser.add_option>),
 ('add_option_group', <unbound method OptionParser.add_option_group>),
 ('add_options', <unbound method OptionParser.add_options>),
 ('check_values', <unbound method OptionParser.check_values>),
 ('destroy', <unbound method OptionParser.destroy>),
 ('disable_interspersed_args',
  <unbound method OptionParser.disable_interspersed_args>),
 ('enable_interspersed_args',
  <unbound method OptionParser.enable_interspersed_args>),
 ('error', <unbound method OptionParser.error>),
 ('exit', <unbound method OptionParser.exit>),
 ('expand_prog_name', <unbound method OptionParser.expand_prog_name>),
 ...
 ]
# python3
>>> inspect.getmembers(OptionParser, predicate=inspect.isfunction)
...

Notice that getmembers returns a list of 2-tuples. The first item is the name of the member, the second item is the value.

You can also pass an instance to getmembers:

>>> parser = OptionParser()
>>> inspect.getmembers(parser, predicate=inspect.ismethod)
...