Question

I am probably approaching this wrong, but would appreciate being straightened out.

I would like to be able to use both the values and the names of some attributes of a class

Sample:

class DoStuff(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.a="Alpha"
        self.b="Beta"
        self.c="Gamma"
    def printStuff(self):
        for thing in [self.a, self.b, self.c]:
            print NAMEOFTHING, thing

What I want is:

a Alpha
b Beta
c Gamma

How can I get that?

Edit: Some confusion because my example showed me printing ALL the values. Instead I want this:

a Alpha
c Gamma

with the list for my print method just having ‘a’ and ‘c’ in it.

Answer 1

The closest you could get is:

for thing in ['a', 'b', 'c']:
    print thing, getattr(self, thing)

Variables can have multiple names and aren’t aware of their own name, so if you know it’s ‘a’, then you can use getattr to resolve the lookup.

Another option (although not greatly different than above)

to_get = ['a', 'b', 'c']
from operator import attrgetter
blah = zip(to_get, attrgetter(*to_get)(self))