Zsiros Levente wrote: > I'm a newbie to Python. I wanted to write a graphical interface which > would show the built-in documentation (I mean dir() and __doc__ ) of > Python. The code shows how far I got before realizing that I had to use > some self-modification feature (converting a string to a function or to > an object; i'm not sure you would call it self-modification in an > interpreted language). > You can convert a string to a function or object using exec and eval but often it's better to use Python's introspection capabilities such as getattr() and setattr(). For example if you want to convert a string received from dir() to the value of the corresponding attribute, use getattr(). Can you say more about why you need to convert a string to an object? > I was googling around, and searching in the maillist archives and found > this: > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/2004-October/032388.html > Unanswered for two years. Not too promising :) > That post is pretty vague. I'm surprised that there was no followup asking for clarification but not surprised that there is no answer.
I don't know of a tutorial on exec and eval but you can find docs here: http://docs.python.org/ref/exec.html http://docs.python.org/lib/built-in-funcs.html#l2h-23 > P.S.: I'm new to this mailing list, so I don't know whether it is > allowed to send code as attachment. (I didn't found anything about your > policy in the subscription site. ) If not, I'm sorry. Short code snippets such as yours can be sent as an attachment or inline in the email. Personally I prefer inline as it makes it easy to reply with comments interspersed with the code. Kent _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
