Title: Determining Current Function Name
Submitter: Alex Martelli (other recipes)
Last Updated: 2001/07/17
Version no: 1.0
Category:

Description:

You want to determine the name of the currently running function, e.g. to create error messages that don't need to be changed when copied to other functions. Function _getframe of module sys does this and much more.

Source: Text Source

# use sys._getframe() -- it returns a frame object, whose attribute
# f_code is a code object, whose attribute co_name is the name:
import sys
this_function_name = sys._getframe().f_code.co_name

# the frame and code objects also offer other useful information:
this_line_number = sys._getframe().f_lineno
this_filename = sys._getframe().f_code.co_filename

# also, by calling sys._getframe(1), you can get this information
# for the *caller* of the current function.  So you can package
# this functionality up into your own handy functions:
def whoami():
    import sys
    return sys._getframe(1).f_code.co_name

me  = whoami()

# this uses argument 1, because the call to whoami is now frame 0.
# and similarly:
def callersname():
    import sys
    return sys._getframe(2).f_code.co_name

him = callersname()

Discussion:

Inspired by Recipe 10.4 in O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook. Python's sys._getframe(), new in 2.1, offers information equivalent to Perl's builtin caller(), __LINE__ and __FILE__. If you need this for older Python releases, see recipe http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/52315, "Obtaining the name of a function/method".