Print all properties of a Python Class [duplicate]

I have a class Animal with several properties like:

class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0
        #many more...

I now want to print all these properties to a text file. The ugly way I'm doing it now is like:

animal=Animal()
output = 'legs:%d, name:%s, color:%s, smell:%s, age:%d, kids:%d' % (animal.legs, animal.name, animal.color, animal.smell, animal.age, animal.kids,)

Is there a better Pythonic way to do this?

Solution 1:

In this simple case you can use vars():

an = Animal()
attrs = vars(an)
# {'kids': 0, 'name': 'Dog', 'color': 'Spotted', 'age': 10, 'legs': 2, 'smell': 'Alot'}
# now dump this in some way or another
print(', '.join("%s: %s" % item for item in attrs.items()))

If you want to store Python objects on the disk you should look at shelve — Python object persistence.

Solution 2:

Another way is to call the dir() function (see https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#dir).

a = Animal()
dir(a)   
>>>
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__',
 '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', 
 '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 
 '__weakref__', 'age', 'color', 'kids', 'legs', 'name', 'smell']

Note, that dir() tries to reach any attribute that is possible to reach.

Then you can access the attributes e.g. by filtering with double underscores:

attributes = [attr for attr in dir(a) 
              if not attr.startswith('__')]

This is just an example of what is possible to do with dir(), please check the other answers for proper way of doing this.