1.4. Everything is an object

In case you missed it, I just said that Python functions have attributes, and that those attributes are available at runtime.

A function, like everything else in Python, is an object.

Example 1.5. Accessing the buildConnectionString function's doc string

>>> import odbchelper                              1
>>> params = {"server":"mpilgrim", "database":"master", "uid":"sa", "pwd":"secret"}
>>> print odbchelper.buildConnectionString(params) 2
server=mpilgrim;uid=sa;database=master;pwd=secret
>>> print odbchelper.buildConnectionString.__doc__ 3
Build a connection string from a dictionary

Returns string.
1 The first line imports the odbchelper program as a module. Once you import a module, you can reference any of its public functions, classes, or attributes. Modules can do this to access functionality in other modules, and you can do it in the IDE too. This is an important concept, and we'll talk more about it later.
2 When you want to use functions defined in imported modules, you have to include the module name. So you can't just say buildConnectionString, it has to be odbchelper.buildConnectionString. If you've used classes in Java, this should feel vaguely familiar.
3 Instead of calling the function like you would expect to, we asked for one of the function's attributes, __doc__.
Note
import in Python is like require in Perl. Once you import a Python module, you access its functions with module.function; once you require a Perl module, you access its functions with module::function.

Everything in Python is an object, and almost everything has attributes and methods.[1] All functions have a built-in attribute __doc__, which returns the doc string defined in the function's source code.

This is so important that I'm going to repeat it in case you missed it the first few times: everything in Python is an object. Strings are objects. Lists are objects. Functions are objects. Even modules are objects, as we'll see shortly.

Further reading

Footnotes

[1] Different programming languages define “object” in different ways. In some, it means that all objects must have attributes and methods; in others, it means that all objects are subclassable. In Python, the definition is looser; some objects have neither attributes nor methods (more on this later in this chapter), and not all objects are subclassable (more on this in chapter 3). But everything is an object in the sense that it can be assigned to a variable or passed as an argument to a function (more in this in chapter 2).