Can you list the keyword arguments a function receives?

python arguments introspection
dbr picture dbr · Oct 13, 2008 · Viewed 52.1k times · Source

I have a dict, which I need to pass key/values as keyword arguments.. For example..

d_args = {'kw1': 'value1', 'kw2': 'value2'}
example(**d_args)

This works fine, but if there are values in the d_args dict that are not accepted by the example function, it obviously dies.. Say, if the example function is defined as def example(kw2):

This is a problem since I don't control either the generation of the d_args, or the example function.. They both come from external modules, and example only accepts some of the keyword-arguments from the dict..

Ideally I would just do

parsed_kwargs = feedparser.parse(the_url)
valid_kwargs = get_valid_kwargs(parsed_kwargs, valid_for = PyRSS2Gen.RSS2)
PyRSS2Gen.RSS2(**valid_kwargs)

I will probably just filter the dict, from a list of valid keyword-arguments, but I was wondering: Is there a way to programatically list the keyword arguments the a specific function takes?

Answer

Brian picture Brian · Oct 13, 2008

A little nicer than inspecting the code object directly and working out the variables is to use the inspect module.

>>> import inspect
>>> def func(a,b,c=42, *args, **kwargs): pass
>>> inspect.getargspec(func)
(['a', 'b', 'c'], 'args', 'kwargs', (42,))

If you want to know if its callable with a particular set of args, you need the args without a default already specified. These can be got by:

def getRequiredArgs(func):
    args, varargs, varkw, defaults = inspect.getargspec(func)
    if defaults:
        args = args[:-len(defaults)]
    return args   # *args and **kwargs are not required, so ignore them.

Then a function to tell what you are missing from your particular dict is:

def missingArgs(func, argdict):
    return set(getRequiredArgs(func)).difference(argdict)

Similarly, to check for invalid args, use:

def invalidArgs(func, argdict):
    args, varargs, varkw, defaults = inspect.getargspec(func)
    if varkw: return set()  # All accepted
    return set(argdict) - set(args)

And so a full test if it is callable is :

def isCallableWithArgs(func, argdict):
    return not missingArgs(func, argdict) and not invalidArgs(func, argdict)

(This is good only as far as python's arg parsing. Any runtime checks for invalid values in kwargs obviously can't be detected.)

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