Let's suppose we have a function like this:
def myFunction(arg1='a default value'):
pass
We can use introspection to find out the names of the arguments that myFunction()
takes using myFunction.func_code.co_varnames
, but how to find out the default value of arg1
(which is 'a default value'
in the above example)?
As an alternative to rooting around in the attributes of the function you can use the inspect module for a slightly friendlier interface:
For Python 3.x interpreters:
import inspect
spec = inspect.getfullargspec(myFunction)
Then spec is a FullArgSpec
object with attributes such as args
and defaults
:
FullArgSpec(args=['arg1'], varargs=None, varkw=None, defaults=('a default value',), kwonlyargs=[], kwonlydefaults=None, annotations={})
Some of these attributes are not available on Python 2 so if you have to use an old version inspect.getargspec(myFunction)
will give you a similar value without the Python 3 features (getargspec
also works on Python 3 but has been deprecated since Python 3.0 so don't use it):
import inspect
spec = inspect.getargspec(myFunction)
Then spec is an ArgSpec
object with attributes such as args
and defaults
:
ArgSpec(args=['arg1'], varargs=None, keywords=None, defaults=('a default value',))
If you define a function f
like this:
>>> def f(a=1, b=True, c="foo"):
... pass
...
in Python 2, you can use:
>>> f.func_defaults
(1, True, 'foo')
>>> help(f)
Help on function f in module __main__:
f(a=1, b=True, c='foo')
whereas in Python 3, it's:
>>> f.__defaults__
(1, True, 'foo')
>>> help(f)
Help on function f in module __main__:
f(a=1, b=True, c='foo')
My bad. Of course, there's myFunction.func_defaults
.