get an array of all a products attributes in magento

Question

I cannot figure this out!

I am trying to get a list of a products attributes into an array on the list.phtml page. I have tried everything. I have seen a lot of solutions that use

$attributes = $product->getAttributes();

but I cannot get this to work, it just brings up a blank page. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have spent hours and hours on this so far...

I am using Magento version 1.4.2.0

UPDATE: Here is exactly what I am trying to do:

$neededAttributes = Mage::helper('mymodule')->getNeededAttributes();
$attributes = $product->getAttributes();
foreach ($attributes as $attribute) {
   if(in_array($attribute->getAttributeCode(), $neededAttributes)) { 
      $attributename = $attribute->getAttributeCode();
  echo $attributename;
   }
 }

this is in the file gallery.phtml in design/adminhtml/default/default/catalog/product/helper/

For some reason, I cannot get the getAttributeCode function to return anything.

Answer 1

I'm guessing you need a list of only visible values. I say "values" because attributes are not the actual values, they are descriptors. The following is the salient parts from Mage_Mage_Catalog_Block_Product_View_Attributes:

$attributes = $product->getAttributes();
foreach ($attributes as $attribute) {
    if ($attribute->getIsVisibleOnFront()) {
        $value = $attribute->getFrontend()->getValue($product);
        // do something with $value here
    }
}

You don't really need to duplicate this though since you can alter/use the template catalog/product/view/attributes.phtml which is already declared on the product view page as attributes block.