How to find all the subclasses of a class given its name?

Question

I need a working approach of getting all classes that are inherited from a base class in Python.

Answer 1

Here's a version without recursion:

def get_subclasses_gen(cls):

    def _subclasses(classes, seen):
        while True:
            subclasses = sum((x.__subclasses__() for x in classes), [])
            yield from classes
            yield from seen
            found = []
            if not subclasses:
                return

            classes = subclasses
            seen = found

    return _subclasses([cls], [])

This differs from other implementations in that it returns the original class. This is because it makes the code simpler and:

class Ham(object):
    pass

assert(issubclass(Ham, Ham)) # True

If get_subclasses_gen looks a bit weird that's because it was created by converting a tail-recursive implementation into a looping generator:

def get_subclasses(cls):

    def _subclasses(classes, seen):
        subclasses = sum(*(frozenset(x.__subclasses__()) for x in classes))
        found = classes + seen
        if not subclasses:
            return found

        return _subclasses(subclasses, found)

    return _subclasses([cls], [])