Question

I’m trying to find the name of the class that contains method code.

In the example underneath I use self.__class__.__name__, but of course this returns the name of the class of which self is an instance and not class that contains the test() method code. b.test() will print 'B' while I would like to get 'A'.

I looked into the inspect module documentation but did not find anything directly useful.

class A:
  def __init__(self):
    pass
  def test(self):
    print self.__class__.__name__

class B(A):
  def __init__(self):
    A.__init__(self)



a = A()
b = B()

a.test()
b.test()

Answer 1

In Python 3.x, you can simply use __class__.__name__. The __class__ name is mildly magic, and not the same thing as the __class__ attribute of self.

In Python 2.x, there is no good way to get at that information. You can use stack inspection to get the code object, then walk the class hierarchy looking for the right method, but it’s slow and tedious and will probably break when you don’t want it to. You can also use a metaclass or a class decorator to post-process the class in some way, but both of those are rather intrusive approaches. And you can do something really ugly, like accessing self.__nonexistant_attribute, catching the AttributeError and extracting the class name from the mangled name. None of those approaches are really worth it if you just want to avoid typing the name twice; at least forgetting to update the name can be made a little more obvious by doing something like:

class C:
    ...
    def report_name(self):
        print C.__name__