How to get current function into a variable?

Question

How can I get a variable that contains the currently executing function in Python? I don't want the function's name. I know I can use inspect.stack to get the current function name. I want the actual callable object. Can this be done without using inspect.stack to retrieve the function's name and then evaling the name to get the callable object?

Edit: I have a reason to do this, but it's not even a remotely good one. I'm using plac to parse command-line arguments. You use it by doing plac.call(main), which generates an ArgumentParser object from the function signature of "main". Inside "main", if there is a problem with the arguments, I want to exit with an error message that includes the help text from the ArgumentParser object, which means that I need to directly access this object by calling plac.parser_from(main).print_help(). It would be nice to be able to say instead: plac.parser_from(get_current_function()).print_help(), so that I am not relying on the function being named "main". Right now, my implementation of "get_current_function" would be:

import inspect    
def get_current_function():
    return eval(inspect.stack()[1][3])

But this implementation relies on the function having a name, which I suppose is not too onerous. I'm never going to do plac.call(lambda ...).

In the long run, it might be more useful to ask the author of plac to implement a print_help method to print the help text of the function that was most-recently called using plac, or something similar.

Answer 1

This is what you asked for, as close as I can come. Tested in python versions 2.4, 2.6, 3.0.

#!/usr/bin/python
def getfunc():
    from inspect import currentframe, getframeinfo
    caller = currentframe().f_back
    func_name = getframeinfo(caller)[2]
    caller = caller.f_back
    from pprint import pprint
    func = caller.f_locals.get(
            func_name, caller.f_globals.get(
                func_name
        )
    )

    return func

def main():
    def inner1():
        def inner2():
            print("Current function is %s" % getfunc())
        print("Current function is %s" % getfunc())
        inner2()
    print("Current function is %s" % getfunc())
    inner1()


#entry point: parse arguments and call main()
if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Output:

Current function is <function main at 0x2aec09fe2ed8>
Current function is <function inner1 at 0x2aec09fe2f50>
Current function is <function inner2 at 0x2aec0a0635f0>

Answer 2

The call stack does not keep a reference to the function itself - although the running frame as a reference to the code object that is the code associated to a given function.

(Functions are objects with code, and some information about their environment, such as closures, name, globals dictionary, doc string, default parameters and so on).

Therefore if you are running a regular function, you are better of using its own name on the globals dictionary to call itself, as has been pointed out.

If you are running some dynamic, or lambda code, in which you can't use the function name, the only solution is to rebuild another function object which re-uses thre currently running code object and call that new function instead.

You will loose a couple of things, like default arguments, and it may be hard to get it working with closures (although it can be done).

I have written a blog post on doing exactly that - calling anonymous functions from within themselves - I hope the code in there can help you:

http://metapython.blogspot.com/2010/11/recursive-lambda-functions.html

On a side note: avoid the use o inspect.stack -- it is too slow, as it rebuilds a lot of information each time it is called. prefer to use inspect.currentframe to deal with code frames instead.

This may sounds complicated, but the code itself is very short - I am pasting it bellow. The post above contains more information on how this works.

from inspect import currentframe
from types import FunctionType

lambda_cache = {}

def myself (*args, **kw):
    caller_frame = currentframe(1)
    code = caller_frame.f_code
    if not code in lambda_cache:
        lambda_cache[code] = FunctionType(code, caller_frame.f_globals)
    return lambda_cache[code](*args, **kw)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    print "Factorial of 5", (lambda n: n * myself(n - 1) if n > 1 else 1)(5)

If you really need the original function itself, the "myself" function above could be made to search on some scopes (like the calling function global dictionary) for a function object which code object would match with the one retrieved from the frame, instead of creating a new function.

Answer 3

The stack frame tells us what code object we're in. If we can find a function object that refers to that code object in its __code__ attribute, we have found the function.

Fortunately, we can ask the garbage collector which objects hold a reference to our code object, and sift through those, rather than having to traverse every active object in the Python world. There are typically only a handful of references to a code object.

Now, functions can share code objects, and do in the case where you return a function from a function, i.e. a closure. When there's more than one function using a given code object, we can't tell which function it is, so we return None.

import inspect, gc

def giveupthefunc():
    frame = inspect.currentframe(1)
    code  = frame.f_code
    globs = frame.f_globals
    functype = type(lambda: 0)
    funcs = []
    for func in gc.get_referrers(code):
        if type(func) is functype:
            if getattr(func, "__code__", None) is code:
                if getattr(func, "__globals__", None) is globs:
                    funcs.append(func)
                    if len(funcs) > 1:
                        return None
    return funcs[0] if funcs else None

Some test cases:

def foo():
    return giveupthefunc()

zed = lambda: giveupthefunc()

bar, foo = foo, None

print bar()
print zed()

I'm not sure about the performance characteristics of this, but i think it should be fine for your use case.

Answer 4

I just define in the beginning of each function a "keyword" which is just a reference to the actual name of the function. I just do this for any function, if it needs it or not:

def test():
    this=test
    if not hasattr(this,'cnt'):
        this.cnt=0
    else:
        this.cnt+=1
    print this.cnt

Answer 5

sys._getframe(0).f_code returns exactly what you need: the codeobject being executed. Having a code object, you can retrieve a name with codeobject.co_name

Answer 6

I recently spent a lot of time trying to do something like this and ended up walking away from it. There's a lot of corner cases.

If you just want the lowest level of the call stack, you can just reference the name that is used in the def statement. This will be bound to the function that you want through lexical closure.

For example:

def recursive(*args, **kwargs):
    me = recursive

me will now refer to the function in question regardless of the scope that the function is called from so long as it is not redefined in the scope where the definition occurs. Is there some reason why this won't work?

To get a function that is executing higher up the call stack, I couldn't think of anything that can be reliably done.