Question

Recently, I find myself writing code like this:

for name in dir( object ):
    if name.startswith( '__' ) : continue
    ...

Is there a more pythonic way to access the object’s “public” namespace?

Answer 1

You can prepare list of “public” attributes (as list or as generator) before:

>>> public_props = (name for name in dir(object) if not name.startswith('_'))
>>> for name in public_props:
    print name

But please read a note about dir() function in the documentation:

Note Because dir() is supplied primarily as a convenience for use at an interactive prompt, it tries to supply an interesting set of names more than it tries to supply a rigorously or consistently defined set of names, and its detailed behavior may change across releases. For example, metaclass attributes are not in the result list when the argument is a class.

You should also be aware, that any class can implement __dir__() method that may return a list of names that do not necessarily correspond to the names of the attributes. In other words, dir(something) does not guarantee that the result will return attributes of something.