Getting the name of a variable as a string

Question

I already read How to get a function name as a string?.

How can I do the same for a variable? As opposed to functions, Python variables do not have the __name__ attribute.

In other words, if I have a variable such as:

foo = dict()
foo['bar'] = 2

I am looking for a function/attribute, e.g. retrieve_name() in order to create a DataFrame in Pandas from this list, where the column names are given by the names of the actual dictionaries:

# List of dictionaries for my DataFrame
list_of_dicts = [n_jobs, users, queues, priorities]
columns = [retrieve_name(d) for d in list_of_dicts] 

Answer 1

With Python 3.8 one can simply use f-string debugging feature:

>>> foo = dict()
>>> f'{foo=}'.split('=')[0]
'foo' 

One drawback of this method is that in order to get 'foo' printed you have to add f'{foo=}' yourself. In other words, you already have to know the name of the variable. In other words, the above code snippet is exactly the same as just

>>> 'foo'

Please see the other answers here that might be applicable to answer the question.

Answer 2

Even if variable values don't point back to the name, you have access to the list of every assigned variable and its value, so I'm astounded that only one person suggested looping through there to look for your var name.

Someone mentioned on that answer that you might have to walk the stack and check everyone's locals and globals to find foo, but if foo is assigned in the scope where you're calling this retrieve_name function, you can use inspect's current frame to get you all of those local variables.

My explanation might be a little bit too wordy (maybe I should've used a "foo" less words), but here's how it would look in code (Note that if there is more than one variable assigned to the same value, you will get both of those variable names):

import inspect

x, y, z = 1, 2, 3

def retrieve_name(var):
    callers_local_vars = inspect.currentframe().f_back.f_locals.items()
    return [var_name for var_name, var_val in callers_local_vars if var_val is var]

print(retrieve_name(y))

---

If you're calling this function from another function, something like:

def foo(bar):
    return retrieve_name(bar)

foo(baz)

And you want the baz instead of bar, you'll just need to go back a scope further. This can be done by adding an extra .f_back in the caller_local_vars initialization.

See an example here: ideone