Print all non-iterable properties of object

Question

As mentioned on SE one can get all the iterable properties of an object with either dir(someObject) or someObject.__dict__. How does one get the non-iterable properties? Some libraries, such as Reqests, return objects with non-iterable properties.

Answer 1

It's impossible to list all attributes reliably in every circumstance, for the simple fact that attributes can be defined at runtime using __getattr__ or __getattribute__.

For example the following class has a 50% chance to create a new attribute or to raise an AttributeError.

import random

class AttributeGenerator(object):
    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        if random.random() < 0.5:
            setattr(self, attr, None)
            return getattr(self, attr) 
        else:
            raise AttributeError(attr)

The only general-purpose functions to get attributes from an instance are dir() and vars().

Note that dir() by default combines the result obtained by __dict__, __slots__ and the class' __dict__ etc. Classes can redefine how dir() works on their instances by defining the __dir__ method, however I've never seen it used. If this method exists and "hides" some attributes for some reason you can simply do something like:

attributes = list(object.__dict__.keys()) + list(obj.__slots__) + list(type(obj).__dict__)

(with the appropriate error checking!) in order to obtain the default's dir() output.

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This said, if you are interested in a particular library then there might be some method specific for that library that works reliably.

Answer 2

import pprint from pprint 
pprint (vars(<object name>))