Accessing the contents of a 'cell' object from Python

[paul cannon]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 03:08:19PM -0700, paul cannon wrote:
> Having poked around a little bit, I found there doesn't appear to be any
> way to get at the contents of a cell object from Python. It's not the
> sort of thing that one needs to be doing very frequently, but I've run
> into a few situations recently where it would be really useful from a
> debugging standpoint.

Okay, I did come up with one solution- create a new function that just
returns a value from its own closure, and manufacture its closure from
the cell you already have.

So..

  import new
  def get_cell_value(cell):
      return new.function(
          (lambda x: lambda: x)(0).func_code, {}, None, None, (cell,)
      )()

It could be optimized a bit by precalculating the code object.

I do still think the earlier solution (giving the cell objects a method)
is cleaner and better long-term, but this will do.

-- 
paul