How to inspect Python objects in similar way like JS objects in Chrome dev console?

Question

In Chrome development console one can type name of a variable and output is a visual and interactive representation of the object. (In JavaScript objects are like dictionaries, so this is easy.)

I would like to have the same functionality in Python. I am shocked I cannot find anything similar. For example in IPython GUI console when I want to inspect variable diff, I get in this case its type instead:

In [5]: diff
Out[5]: <_pygit2.Diff at 0x1a69930>

This command inspect the variable, but output is chaotic for complicated objects (here the output is incomplete):

In [10]: inspect.getmembers(diff)
Out[10]: [('__class__', <type '_pygit2.Diff'>), ('__delattr__', <method-wrapper '__delattr__' of _pygit2.Diff object at 0x1a69930>), ('__doc__', 'Diff objects.'), ('__format__', <built-in method __format__ of _pygit2.Diff object at 0x1a69930>), ('__getattribute__', (...)

I think a live introspection is very useful when language has no typesystem. Maybe this functionality is available only in special Python IDEs?

To show how it is done in Chrome:

On the picture you can see an introspecion of variable f. It is an object of type Form, you can click on it and see its properties (e.g. _meetingTimeFrom) and theirs values, you can click further on properties to inspect them, you can see object's methods (e.g. field __proto__, this might be a way how to see object methods in JavaScript).

Answer 1

If you just want to list attributes in readable way, pprint.pprint is your friend:

from pprint import pprint
from inspect import getmembers

class X:
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

x = X([42] * 5, [True] * 15)

pprint(getmembers(x))
pprint(vars(x))

If you're interested in a GUI for this, take a look at objbrowser. It uses the inspect module from the Python standard library for the object introspection underneath.

Original answer by titusjan