Object and class introspection

Both Python and Qt offer a great deal of object introspection functionality — that is, methods of determining at runtime what kind of class an object is an instance of, or what methods an object implements. It has often been difficult to make Python and Qt introspection mesh well. One example is the QObject.className(), which returns the name of the class of an object. Until PyQt version 2.5, this function always returned QObject, instead of the Python class name. Since that version, however, it returns the true class name:

Python 2.1 (#1, Apr 17 2001, 20:50:35) [GCC 2.95.2 19991024
(release)] on linux2 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license"
for more information. 
>>> from qt import *
>>> t=QTimer() 
>>> t.className() 'QTimer'
>>> class A(QTimer): pass ... 
>>> a=A()
>>> a.className() 'A' 
>>> a.inherits('QTimer') 1
      

For interesting Python introspection functions you should consult the Python language reference — but the equivalent using Python idioms of the above session would be:

        >>> t.__class__ <class qt.QTimer at 0x8232cc4>
        >>> a.__class__ <class __main__.A at 0x826c2ac>
        >>> a.__class__.__bases__ (<class qt.QTimer at
        0x8232cc4>,)
      

Object introspection is especially useful if you dabble in the black art known as meta-programming — that is, creating a program that run-time constructs some of the classes it needs. Heaps of fun — but not always innocent fun.