The command whos and linemagic %whos are available in IPython, but are not part of standard Python. Both of these will list current variables, along with some information about them. You can specify a type to filter by, e.g.
whos
Variable Type Data/Info
----------------------------
a list n=3
b int 2
c str hello
whos list
Variable Type Data/Info
----------------------------
a list n=3
The related command who or linemagic %who will produce a short list, showing the variable names only:
who
a
who list
a
To Inspect a specific variable the ? is what you are looking for:
a?
Type: list
String form: [1, 2, 3]
Length: 3
Docstring:
list() -> new empty list
list(iterable) -> new list initialized from iterable's items
If you want even more information about an object, such as a function. You can use two ? in the form word?? to get the complete object help. For example, to get the complete documentation for the type int you would use:
int??
Type: type
String form: type 'int'>
Namespace: Python builtin
Docstring:
int(x=0) -> int or long
int(x, base=10) -> int or long
Convert a number or string to an integer, or return 0 if no arguments
are given. If x is floating point, the conversion truncates towards zero.
If x is outside the integer range, the function returns a long instead.
If x is not a number or if base is given, then x must be a string or
Unicode object representing an integer literal in the given base. The
literal can be preceded by '+' or '-' and be surrounded by whitespace.
The base defaults to 10. Valid bases are 0 and 2-36. Base 0 means to
interpret the base from the string as an integer literal.
>>> int('0b100', base=0)
4
This post first appeared on Martin Fitzpatrick – Python Coder, Postgraduate, please read the originial post: here
