Question

I work in a Python shell. In order to produce a list of all global names I use dir(), but it generates a very long list, which I would like to filter. I am interested only in the names which begin with ‘f’ and end with digits. Sometimes I also need only user-defined names, no __*__ names. Is there any grep-like method in a Python shell to filter its output?

Answer 1

[n for n in dir() if re.match("f.*[0-9]$", n)]

I set my PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable to point to ~/.startup.py which contains:

# Ned's startup.py file, loaded into interactive python prompts.

print("(.startup.py)")

import datetime, os, pprint, re, sys, time

print("(imported datetime, os, pprint, re, sys, time)")

def dirx(thing, regex):
    return [ n for n in dir(thing) if re.search(regex, n) ]

pp = pprint.pprint

Now I always have a few handy modules imported, and I have shortcuts available for things I often do in the shell.