Getting the name of a variable as a string

Question

This thread discusses how to get the name of a function as a string in Python: How to get a function name as a string?

How can I do the same for a variable? As oppose

Answer 1

Using the python-varname package, you can easily retrieve the name of the variables

https://github.com/pwwang/python-varname

In your case, you can do:

from varname import Wrapper

foo = Wrapper(dict())

# foo.name == 'foo'
# foo.value == {}
foo.value['bar'] = 2

For list comprehension part, you can do:

n_jobs = Wrapper() 
users = Wrapper() 
queues = Wrapper() 
priorities = Wrapper() 

list_of_dicts = [n_jobs, users, queues, priorities]
columns = [d.name for d in list_of_dicts]
# ['n_jobs', 'users', 'queues', 'priorities']
# REMEMBER that you have to access the  by d.value

You can also try to retrieve the variable name DIRECTLY:

from varname import nameof

foo = dict()

fooname = nameof(foo)
# fooname == 'foo'

Note that this is working in this case as you expected:

n_jobs = 
d = n_jobs

nameof(d) # will return d, instead of n_jobs
# nameof only works directly with the variable

I am the author of this package. Please let me know if you have any questions or you can submit issues on Github.