Extracting properties from Python objects for OpenAI API

When using OpenAI for coding tasks, we often include details about Python objects such as variables, functions, and classes in our prompts. This helps with various tasks such as debugging, generating docstrings, creating unit test suites, or improving code. The information provided may include the object name, arguments, return type, filename, docstring, and source code.

Throughout this book, we frequently use the built-in inspect package to extract relevant details from Python objects. Additionally, we leverage some special attributes, identified by a double underscore (dunder), such as obj.__attribute__, which store metadata about the object or class. Here are some more examples:

• obj.__name__ retrieves the name of the object
• obj.__class__.__name__ retrieves the class name of an instance or function or the metaclass name of a class
• obj.__doc__ retrieves the docstring of the object

To extract...