dir() without built-in methods

Do you just want to filter out the "special" methods, or actually know which methods are implemented in the instance itself, not inherited from a base (or both, as these are different questions, really)?

You can filter out the special methods with something reasonably simple like:

def vdir(obj):
    return [x for x in dir(obj) if not x.startswith('__')]

>>> vdir(a)
['foo']