"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Restating: I'm doing some debugging of some code. I want to print out
> the value of two variables whose names are known. Let's call them
> myTime and myPlace.
>
> #debug:
> if self.debug:
> print "myTime = %s, myPlace = %s" % (myTime, myPlace)
>
> Notice that I had to type the variable's name once as an object, and
> once as the string representation of that object, i.e. the object's
> name.
> I wondered whether it might not be possible to do something like this:
> if self.debug:
> print "%s = %s" % ( name(myTime), myTime )
> where 'name' is the method or trick I'm after.
I must admit this is a bit of a sore point with me: this could be
solved so easily with a nice little macro <ducks>. For the case where
you only want to print the name and value of a variable (as opposed to
that of an expression), you may find this little function helpful:
def print_variable(name, scope):
print "%s = %r" % (name, scope[name])
You can call it like this:
print_variable('myTime', locals())
Not perfect, because you have to repeat locals() every time, but it
does save the repetition of the variable name.
Printing expressions can also be accomplished in a similar but more
dangerous[*] fashion:
def print_expression(expression, local_scope, global_scope=None):
if global_scope is None:
global_scope = globals()
print "%s = %r" % (expression,
eval(expression, local_scope, global_scope))
Example:
print_expression('i+1', locals())
[*] The use of eval here would make allowing user-entered expressions
here very dangerous, but as long as as it is used as a debugging
aid, with the expression as a literal string in the program, there
should be no security issue. I would never use either of these
functions except as debugging aids anyway.
Regards,
--
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Aaron Bingham
Software Engineer
Cenix BioScience GmbH
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