Question

locals() is a dict. If I do a simple:

for i in locals().keys():
     type(i)

…what’s returned is that the names are all strings (yes, in point of fact, they are) but those keys indicate different types – one might be, say, a module. Some reference types (objects) but also primitive types (e.g. int, string).

In some sense, I want to extract the name from the string. Looked at how to do this with the attributes on a string but no go. I believe I need something from introspection, but what?

Answer 1

locals().keys() returns all the variable names bound in local space. Since they are names, they are all strings. (In Python 2.x you could use locals().iterkeys() for this also, to get an iterator.)

Try locals().values() instead. For Python 2.x, you can use locals().itervalues() to get an iterator.

Or locals().items() to get key, value pairs. For Python 2.x you can use locals().iteritems() to get an iterator.