Getting a List of Class Methods in Python

Accessing the list of methods in a Python class can be beneficial for various purposes, such as iterating through them or differentiating the handling of instances based on their methods. This article will explore how to achieve this task effectively in Python using the inspect module.

To list the methods of a class, you can use the getmembers function along with the inspect.ismethod predicate. This technique will provide a list of tuples, where each tuple consists of the method name and its corresponding unbound method object.

For instance, to retrieve the methods of the optparse.OptionParser class, you can use the following code:

from optparse import OptionParser
import inspect

# Python 2
inspect.getmembers(OptionParser, predicate=inspect.ismethod)

# Python 3
inspect.getmembers(OptionParser, predicate=inspect.isfunction)

Alternatively, you can pass an instance of the class to getmembers instead of the class itself to obtain the bound methods of that particular instance.

This method is particularly useful when you need to perform certain operations based on the presence or absence of specific methods in a class. By gaining access to the list of methods, you can dynamically control your program's behavior and achieve customized functionality.