Print all properties of a Python Class

I have a class Animal with several properties like:

class Animal(object):
def init(self):
self.legs = 2
self.name = 'Dog'
self.color= 'Spotted'
self.smell= 'Alot'
self.age  = 10
self.kids = 0
#many more...

I now want to print all these properties to a text file. The ugly way I'm doing it now is like:

animal=Animal()
output = 'legs:%d, name:%s, color:%s, smell:%s, age:%d, kids:%d' % (animal.legs, animal.name, animal.color, animal.smell, animal.age, animal.kids,)

Is there a better Pythonic way to do this?

In this simple case you can use [vars()][1]:

an = Animal()
attrs = vars(an)
# {'kids': 0, 'name': 'Dog', 'color': 'Spotted', 'age': 10, 'legs': 2, 'smell': 'Alot'}
# now dump this in some way or another
print(', '.join("%s: %s" % item for item in attrs.items()))

If you want to store Python objects on the disk you should look at [shelve — Python object persistence][2].

[1]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#vars "vars()" [2]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/shelve.html "shelve — Python object persistence"

Another way is to call the [dir()][1] function (see [https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#dir][1]).

a = Animal()
dir(a)   
>>>
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__',  '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__',  '__weakref__', 'age', 'color', 'kids', 'legs', 'name', 'smell']

Note, that [dir()][1] tries to reach any attribute that is possible to reach.

Then you can access the attributes e.g. by filtering with double underscores:

attributes = [attr for attr in dir(a) 
              if not attr.startswith('__')]

This is just an example of what is possible to do with [dir()][1], please check the other answers for proper way of doing this.

[1]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#dir "dir"

Maybe you are looking for something like this?

    >>> class MyTest:
        def __init__ (self):
	        self.value = 3
    >>> myobj = MyTest()
    >>> myobj.__dict__
    {'value': 3}

try ppretty:

from ppretty import ppretty


class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0


print ppretty(Animal(), seq_length=10)

Output:

__main__.Animal(age = 10, color = 'Spotted', kids = 0, legs = 2, name = 'Dog', smell = 'Alot')

Here is full code. The result is exactly what you want.

class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    animal = Animal()
    temp = vars(animal)
    for item in temp:
        print item , ' : ' , temp[item]
        #print item , ' : ', temp[item] ,

Just try beeprint

it prints something like this:

instance(Animal):
    legs: 2,
    name: 'Dog',
    color: 'Spotted',
    smell: 'Alot',
    age: 10,
    kids: 0,

I think is exactly what you need.