Inverse of id()?

[Alex Martelli]

Paul McGuire <ptmcg at austin.rr.com> wrote:

> Is there an inverse function to the builtin 'id'?  The poster who

No, there isn't.

> Now is there anything better than this search technique to get back a
> variable, given its id?

For your own classes/types, you could override __new__ to maintain a
class-wide (or even wider) weakref.WeakValueDictionary with id as the
key and the instance as the (weakly held) value.  For the general case,
this wouldn't work -- however as your "search technique" checks globals
only, it's pretty weak (it wouldn't find a value that's only held as an
item in a list even if that list were global, for example).  You might
do a bit better by checking through gc.get_objects(), but that won't get
objects of many types, such as int, float, str...


Alex