Get Outer Class Name for Nested Class (Python)

Question

Background

(Might be relevant because there might be a simpler way to achieve what I want.)

I want to build a declarative way to define "aspects" that can be analyzed by a static code analysis tool. The whole concept is written down here. Every aspect (say

Redundancy

) may have sub aspects recursively (say

Redundancy.Clone

) and every aspect shall have documentation and arbitrary other properties. The user shall be able to choose which aspects to analyze and I have to programmatically find out for the internal representation of an aspect if it's the one choosen by the user (i.e. for a given class

Redundancy.Clone

I want to validate that it belongs to a given string

redundancy.clone

but not

redundancy.unused_import

).

I decided to use classes like this:

class Redundancy(Aspect):

    """

    This meta aspect describes any kind of redundancy in your source code.

    """



    # Can't inherit from Redundancy here because of the recursion

    class Clone(Aspect):

        """

        This redundancy describes a code clone. Code clones are different pieces of

        code in your codebase that are very similar.

        """



        # Stuff...

Problem

For a given

Aspect

class I want to get the describing string (

Redundancy.Clone

->

redundancy.clone

). For that I have to get the name of the surrounding module/class/whatever it is, check if it's a class (trivial) and construct a string out of it.

Possible Solutions and How They Failed

I did try looking at the

dir

of my classes to see if there's anything useful in the dunder methods I could use but found nothing except the

repr

which in the above case is

<class 'coalib.bearlib.aspects.Redundancy.Clone'>

when living in the

aspects

module. This shows that it should be possible but I have no idea on how

repr

gets this information and I would like to avoid using

repr

and stripping off the unneeded stuff as that's kind of a hack.

I am not able to inherit the nested class from the outer one as it is not completely defined yet. I want them nested for the usability, being able to

from ... import Redundancy

and in my source code write

Redundancy.Clone

is a huge plus.

Any suggestions, including changing my approach, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You could use __qualname__ (PEP 3155)

>>> class C:
...   def f(): pass
...   class D:
...     def g(): pass
...
>>> C.__qualname__
'C'
>>> C.f.__qualname__
'C.f'
>>> C.D.__qualname__
'C.D'
>>> C.D.g.__qualname__
'C.D.g'

Get Outer Class Name for Nested Class (Python)

Background

Problem

Possible Solutions and How They Failed

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