can you use getattr to call a function within your scope?

Question

I'm trying to do something like this, but I can't figure out how to call the function bar.

def foo():
 def bar(baz):
 print('used getattr to call', baz)
 getattr(bar, __call__())('bar')
foo()

Notice, that this is somewhat unusual. Normally you'd have an object and get an attribute on that, which could be a function. then it's easy to run. but what if you just have a function within the current scope - how to do getattr on the current scope to run the function?

Answer 1

You are close. To use getattr, pass the string value of the name of the attribute:

getattr(bar, "__call__")('bar')

i.e

def foo():
 def bar(baz):
 print('used getattr to call', baz)
 getattr(bar, "__call__")('bar')
foo()

Output:

used getattr to call bar

• MetaStack: what if I wanted to do getattr('bar', "__call__")('bar') ? when I try to make the function referenced via a string I get AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute '__call__' Is there any way to reference the name of that dynamically?
• MetaStack: I just used a map, this works for my purposes methods = {'bar': bar} ; getattr(methods['bar']...
• Sam Mason: just call the locals() function, it returns a dictionary of objects from the local scope

Answer 2

alternatively, you can also use the locals() function which returns a dict of local symbols:

def foo():
 def bar(baz):
 print('used getattr to call', baz)
 locals()['bar']('pouet')
foo()

It also allows you to get the function by its name instead of its reference without need for a custom mapping.