Python dictionary from an object's fields

Note that best practice in Python 2.7 is to use new-style classes (not needed with Python 3), i.e.

class Foo(object):   ...

Also, there's a difference between an 'object' and a 'class'. To build a dictionary from an arbitrary object, it's sufficient to use __dict__. Usually, you'll declare your methods at class level and your attributes at instance level, so __dict__ should be fine. For example:

>>> class A(object):...   def __init__(self):...     self.b = 1...     self.c = 2...   def do_nothing(self):...     pass...>>> a = A()>>> a.__dict__{'c': 2, 'b': 1}

A better approach (suggested by robert in comments) is the builtin vars function:

>>> vars(a){'c': 2, 'b': 1}

Alternatively, depending on what you want to do, it might be nice to inherit from dict. Then your class is already a dictionary, and if you want you can override getattr and/or setattr to call through and set the dict. For example:

class Foo(dict):    def __init__(self):        pass    def __getattr__(self, attr):        return self[attr]    # etc...

Instead of x.__dict__, it's actually more pythonic to use vars(x).

The dir builtin will give you all the object's attributes, including special methods like __str__, __dict__ and a whole bunch of others which you probably don't want. But you can do something like:

>>> class Foo(object):...     bar = 'hello'...     baz = 'world'...>>> f = Foo()>>> [name for name in dir(f) if not name.startswith('__')][ 'bar', 'baz' ]>>> dict((name, getattr(f, name)) for name in dir(f) if not name.startswith('__')) { 'bar': 'hello', 'baz': 'world' }

So can extend this to only return data attributes and not methods, by defining your props function like this:

import inspectdef props(obj):    pr = {}    for name in dir(obj):        value = getattr(obj, name)        if not name.startswith('__') and not inspect.ismethod(value):            pr[name] = value    return pr