[New-bugs-announce] [issue17643] Expose weakref callback for introspection purposes.

[Mark Dickinson]

New submission from Mark Dickinson:

It would be nice to be able to access the callback of a weakref as an attribute on the weakref itself.  For example:

Python 3.4.0a0 (default:2bf154ca43c6+, Apr  6 2013, 13:31:29) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import weakref
>>> x = {1, 2, 3}
>>> ref = weakref.ref(x, lambda ref: print("done"))
>>> ref.__callback__
<function <lambda> at 0x1004f56d0>
>>> del x
done
>>> ref.__callback__  # Returns None

I encountered this while writing a tool to show graphs of Python objects and their references to each other:  I wanted to be able to annotate each edge of the graph.  For something like a function, it's easy to use introspection to compare the reference target with f.__code__, f.__annotations__, etc.  For a weakref, I couldn't find an easy way to retrieve the callback (or even determine whether there *was* a callback associated to the weakref).  One can do a "gc.get_referents" call and hope that if there's exactly one object returned it's the callback, but that won't work so well with weakref.ref subclasses.

Patch attached:  it has tests but no doc updates as yet.

----------
components: Interpreter Core
files: weakref___callback__.patch
keywords: patch
messages: 186122
nosy: mark.dickinson
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: patch review
status: open
title: Expose weakref callback for introspection purposes.
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.4
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file29685/weakref___callback__.patch

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue17643>
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