Question

How can I get the int(), float(), dict(), etc. callables from their names? For example, I’m trying to save Python values to xml and storing the variable type as a string. Is there a way to get the callable from the string when converting from string back to the Python type?

Normally I would do something like getattr(myobj, ‘str’), but there is no module to use as the first argument for these built-in conversion functions. I’ve also tried getattr(object, ‘str’), but this doesn’t work either since these functions are not part of the base ‘object’ type, merely globals to the language.

Answer 1

Normally I would do something like getattr(myobj, 'str'), but there is no module to use as the first argument for these built-in conversion functions.

Wrong, there is:

import __builtin__
my_str = getattr(__builtin__, "str")

(In Python 3.x: import builtins)