[python] Print all properties of a Python Class

I have a class Animal with several properties like:

class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0
        #many more...

I now want to print all these properties to a text file. The ugly way I'm doing it now is like:

animal=Animal()
output = 'legs:%d, name:%s, color:%s, smell:%s, age:%d, kids:%d' % (animal.legs, animal.name, animal.color, animal.smell, animal.age, animal.kids,)

Is there a better Pythonic way to do this?

try ppretty:

from ppretty import ppretty


class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0


print ppretty(Animal(), seq_length=10)

Output:

__main__.Animal(age = 10, color = 'Spotted', kids = 0, legs = 2, name = 'Dog', smell = 'Alot')

Another way is to call the dir() function (see https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#dir).

a = Animal()
dir(a)   
>>>
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__getattribute__',
 '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', 
 '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 
 '__weakref__', 'age', 'color', 'kids', 'legs', 'name', 'smell']

Note, that dir() tries to reach any attribute that is possible to reach.

Then you can access the attributes e.g. by filtering with double underscores:

attributes = [attr for attr in dir(a) 
              if not attr.startswith('__')]

This is just an example of what is possible to do with dir(), please check the other answers for proper way of doing this.

Maybe you are looking for something like this?

    >>> class MyTest:
        def __init__ (self):
            self.value = 3
    >>> myobj = MyTest()
    >>> myobj.__dict__
    {'value': 3}

Here is full code. The result is exactly what you want.

class Animal(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.legs = 2
        self.name = 'Dog'
        self.color= 'Spotted'
        self.smell= 'Alot'
        self.age  = 10
        self.kids = 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    animal = Animal()
    temp = vars(animal)
    for item in temp:
        print item , ' : ' , temp[item]
        #print item , ' : ', temp[item] ,

Just try beeprint

it prints something like this:

instance(Animal):
    legs: 2,
    name: 'Dog',
    color: 'Spotted',
    smell: 'Alot',
    age: 10,
    kids: 0,

I think is exactly what you need.