[Python] Find available methods and help in REPL

Posted 2020-10-17 Answer1215

For example you want to know what methods are available in Python for String, you can do :

dir("xxx")

Output:

>>> dir("string")
[‘__add__‘, ‘__class__‘, ‘__contains__‘, ‘__delattr__‘, ‘__dir__‘, ‘__doc__‘, ‘__eq__‘, ‘__format__‘, ‘__ge__‘, ‘__getattribute__‘, ‘__getitem__‘, ‘__getnewargs__‘, ‘__gt__‘, ‘__hash__‘, ‘__init__‘, ‘__init_subclass__‘, ‘__iter__‘, ‘__le__‘, ‘__len__‘, ‘__lt__‘, ‘__mod__‘, ‘__mul__‘, ‘__ne__‘, ‘__new__‘, ‘__reduce__‘, ‘__reduce_ex__‘, ‘__repr__‘, ‘__rmod__‘, ‘__rmul__‘, ‘__setattr__‘, ‘__sizeof__‘, ‘__str__‘, ‘__subclasshook__‘, ‘capitalize‘, ‘casefold‘, ‘center‘, ‘count‘, ‘encode‘, ‘endswith‘, ‘expandtabs‘, ‘find‘, ‘format‘, ‘format_map‘, ‘index‘, ‘isalnum‘, ‘isalpha‘, ‘isdecimal‘, ‘isdigit‘, ‘isidentifier‘, ‘islower‘, ‘isnumeric‘, ‘isprintable‘, ‘isspace‘, ‘istitle‘, ‘isupper‘, ‘join‘, ‘ljust‘, ‘lower‘, ‘lstrip‘, ‘maketrans‘, ‘partition‘, ‘replace‘, ‘rfind‘, ‘rindex‘, ‘rjust‘, ‘rpartition‘, ‘rsplit‘, ‘rstrip‘, ‘split‘, ‘splitlines‘, ‘startswith‘, ‘strip‘, ‘swapcase‘, ‘title‘, ‘translate‘, ‘upper‘, ‘zfill‘]

 

Now for example, we want to see How to use ‘swapcase‘ method:

help("foo".swapcase)

 

It will show example and description about the method, which is very useful