How to get all the variables in a python shell

[caca at mailinator.com]

  Your project interests me. Actually I was thinking about doing the
same. I hadn't worked on it at all, but I though about it and had the
idea about reading the session namespace directly, which I though
would be stored in the __dict__ attribute of something.

  After reading your post, I have been trying a little bit, and I have
found a way to do it with ipython. If you open an ipython console,
press _ then hit TAB, you'll see it stores some useful information,
including all input, all output, and after some searching, a
dictionary matching all variables to its values.

__IPYTHON__.user_ns

  There is a little extra stuff in there that you don't want, but that
can be easily filtered (the extra stuff is either 'In', 'Out', 'help'
or starts with '_'). I've tried it, and you can change the value in
that dict to alter the value of the real variable. Say you have a
variable 'test':

test=5
__IPYTHON__.user_ns['test']=4
print test #prints 5

  If I get it right, python is a dynamic language, and you won't break
things by messing around with its inner stuff like this, but you
better check it.

  Is this what you had in mind?