Printing the name of a variable

Thu Sep 9 16:11:27 EDT 2010

On Thu, 2010年09月09日 at 12:43 -0700, Stephen Boulet wrote:
> Does an arbitrary variable carry an attribute describing the text in
> its name? I'm looking for something along the lines of:
>> x = 10
> print x.name
> >>> 'x'
>> Perhaps the x.__getattribute__ method? Thanks.

Variables are not objects and so they have no attributes.
You can't really de-reference the object being referenced as it can
potentially contain multiple references, but an innacurate way of doing
this would be, e.g.
>>> x = [1, 2, 3]
>>> y = x
>>> g = globals() 
>>> varnames = [i for i in g if g[i] is x]
['x', 'y']
But this cries the question: why do you want to do this? And usually
that question is asked when someone thinks that a: you shouldn't need to
do this and b: whatever the desired effect there is probably a better
way of accomplishing it.