How to find the names of classes inside a python module?

Question

If I import a module:

import foo

How can I find the names of the classes it contains?

Answer 1

You can use the inspect module to do this. For example:

import inspect
import foo

for name, obj in inspect.getmembers(foo):
    if inspect.isclass(obj):
        print name

Answer 2

Check in dir(foo). By convention, the class names will be those in CamelCase.

If foo breaks convention, you could I guess get the class names with something like [x for x in dir(foo) if type(getattr(foo, x)) == type], but that's ugly and probably quite fragile.

Answer 3

From the question How to check whether a variable is a class or not? we can check if a variable is a class or not with the inspect module (example code shamelessly lifted from the accepted answer):

>>> import inspect
>>> class X(object):
...     pass
... 
>>> inspect.isclass(X)
True

So to build a list with all the classes from a module we could use

import foo
classes = [c for c in dir(foo) if inspect.isclass(getattr(foo, c))]

Update: The above example has been edited to use getattr(foo, c) rather than use foo.__getattribute__(c), as per @Chris Morgan's comment.

Answer 4

You can get a lot of information about a Python module, say foo, by importing it and then using help(module-name) as follows:

>>> import foo 
>>> help(foo)

Answer 5

You can check the type of elements found via dir(foo): classes will have type type.

import foo
classlist = []
for i in dir(foo):
    if type(foo.__getattribute__(i)) is type:
        classlist.append(i)