how to get names of attributes

[Charles T. Smith]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2015 11:51:19 +0000, Charles T. Smith wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> How can I get *all* the names of an object's attributes?  I have legacy
> code with mixed new style classes and old style classes and I need to
> write methods which deal with both.  That's the immediate problem, but
> I'm always running into the need to understand how objects are linked,
> in particular when in pdb.  The answers one always sees on StackOverflow
> is that you don't need to understand, understanding is not the pythonic
> way to do things.
> 
> Alternatively, is there are map documented somewhere - more complete
> than python/python-2.7.3-docs-html/library/stdtypes.html?
> highlight=class#special-attributes
> 
> Or, is the code available uncompiled somewhere on my machine?
> 
> Does anyone know *why* the __members__ method was deprecated, to be
> replaced by dir(), which doesn't tell the truth (if only it took an
> optional parameter to say: "be truthful")
> 
> cts


For example:

    (PDB)pp dir   (newclass.__class__)
    ['__class__',
     '__delattr__',
     '__dict__',
     '__doc__',
     '__format__',
     '__getattribute__',
     '__hash__',
     '__init__',
     '__module__',
     '__new__',
     '__reduce__',
     '__reduce_ex__',
     '__repr__',
     '__setattr__',
     '__sizeof__',
     '__str__',
     '__subclasshook__',
     '__weakref__',
     'm2']

    (PDB)pp dir   (oldclass.__class__)
    ['__doc__', '__module__', 'm3']

    (PDB)pp    (oldclass.__class__.__name__)
    'C3'

    (PDB)pp    (newclass.__class__.__name__)
    'C2'

Both dir() invocations are lying to me.  The old-style class even ignores 
the pretty-print command.

I'm glad I discovered __mro__(), but how can I do the same thing for old-
style classes?