I wouldn't call the responses here helpful; they seem overspecific. I had a similar problem which led to the follwing code. After I came up with this I saw a very similar utility was derived in Dive into Python.
see http://diveintopython.org/power_of_introspection/index.html#apihelper.divein Anyway the following is intended as an interactive utility to explore the callables of modules and classes. I always have it imported into my interactive sessions. So import it and try sm(dict) .######################################################## .# sm() .# showmethods . .def sm(namespace,terse=0,maxchars=300): . . """report the callables of a namespace . .returns a nice string representation of the public callables of the .namespace and the first maxchars bytes of their respective docstrings . .if terse, truncates the docstring at the first newline . """ . . d = namespace.__dict__ . l = [str(x) + "\t\t" + str(d[x].__doc__)[:maxchars] for x in d.keys() \ . if callable(d[x]) and not x.startswith("_")] . if terse: . l = [x.split("\n")[0] for x in l] . l.sort() . return "\n=====\n".join(l) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list