Accessing AST at runtime

[Ramchandra Apte]

On Sunday, 2 September 2012 08:00:59 UTC+5:30, (unknown)  wrote:
> Hi,
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> I would like to access the AST of a python object at runtime. I mean, if I have this:
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> def f(x): return x*x/2
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> Is there any way to interrogate the object f to find out the AST of the expression x*x/2 ? Of course if the definition of f were in a file, I could use the ast module to parse it; but what I want is to do this from within the code.
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> The closest thing I was able to find was f.__code__, and more specifically f.__code__.co_code, but that is a byte-string which seems to be the bytecode (?) for the function.
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> This may not be possible at all; maybe after the def statement is processed by the Python interpreter the AST information is discarded. But I wanted to check here if someone knows one way or another.
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> Many thanks.

You could scan the text for code and then ast.parse() it.
Then you know how...