Getting an instance name inside class __init__()

Question

While building a new class object in python, I want to be able to create a default value based on the instance name of the class without passing in an extra argument. How can I accomplish this? Here's the basic pseudo-code I'm trying for:

class SomeObject():
    defined_name = u""

    def __init__(self, def_name=None):
        if def_name == None:
            def_name = u"%s" % (<INSTANCE NAME>)
        self.defined_name = def_name

ThisObject = SomeObject()
print ThisObject.defined_name   # Should print "ThisObject"

Answer 1

Well, there is almost a way to do it:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import traceback
class SomeObject():
    def __init__(self, def_name=None):
        if def_name == None:
            (filename,line_number,function_name,text)=traceback.extract_stack()[-2]
            def_name = text[:text.find('=')].strip()
        self.defined_name = def_name

ThisObject = SomeObject()
print ThisObject.defined_name 
# ThisObject

The traceback module allows you to peek at the code used to call SomeObject(). With a little string wrangling, text[:text.find('=')].strip() you can guess what the def_name should be.

However, this hack is brittle. For example, this doesn't work so well:

ThisObject,ThatObject = SomeObject(),SomeObject()
print ThisObject.defined_name
# ThisObject,ThatObject
print ThatObject.defined_name 
# ThisObject,ThatObject

So if you were to use this hack, you have to bear in mind that you must call SomeObject() using simple python statement:

ThisObject = SomeObject()

By the way, as a further example of using traceback, if you define

def pv(var):
    # stack is a list of 4-tuples: (filename, line number, function name, text)
    # see http://docs.python.org/library/traceback.html#module-traceback
    #
    (filename,line_number,function_name,text)=traceback.extract_stack()[-2]
    # ('x_traceback.py', 18, 'f', 'print_var(y)')
    print('%s: %s'%(text[text.find('(')+1:-1],var))

then you can call

x=3.14
pv(x)
# x: 3.14

to print both the variable name and its value.