Using Rich Inspect to interrogate Python objects

The Rich library has a few functions that are admittedly a little out of scope for a terminal color library. One such function is inspect which is so useful you may want to pip install rich just for this feature.

The easiest way to describe inspect is that it is Python's builtin help() but easier on the eye (and with a few more features). If you invoke it with any object, inspect will display a nicely formatted report on that object — which makes it great for interrogating objects from the REPL. Here's an example:

>>> from rich import inspect
>>> text_file = open("foo.txt", "w")
>>> inspect(text_file)

Here we're inspecting a file object, but it could be literally anything. You will see the following output in the terminal:

By default, inspect will generate a data-oriented summary with a text representation of the object and its data attributes. You can also add methods=True to show all the methods in the public API. Here's an example:

>>> inspect(text_file, methods=True)

The documentation is summarized by default to avoid generating verbose reports. If you want to see the full unabbreviated help you can add help=True:

>>> inspect(text_file, methods=True, help=True)

There are a few more arguments to refine the level of detail you need (private methods, dunder attributes etc). You can see the full range of options with this delightful little incantation:

>>> inspect(inspect)

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Addendum

Here's how to have inspect always available without an explicit import: