How can I get the name of an object in Python?

Objects do not necessarily have names in Python, so you can't get the name.

It's not unusual for objects to have a __name__ attribute in those cases that they do have a name, but this is not a part of standard Python, and most built in types do not have one.

When you create a variable, like the x, y, z above then those names just act as "pointers" or "references" to the objects. The object itself does not know what name you are using for it, and you can not easily (if at all) get the names of all references to that object.

Update: However, functions do have a __name__ (unless they are lambdas) so, in that case you can do:

dict([(t.__name__, t) for t in fun_list])

That's not really possible, as there could be multiple variables that have the same value, or a value might have no variable, or a value might have the same value as a variable only by chance.

If you really want to do that, you can use

def variable_for_value(value):
    for n,v in globals().items():
        if v == value:
            return n
    return None

However, it would be better if you would iterate over names in the first place:

my_list = ["x", "y", "z"] # x, y, z have been previously defined

for name in my_list:
    print "handling variable ", name
    bla = globals()[name]
    # do something to bla

 

This one-liner works, for all types of objects, as long as they are in globals() dict, which they should be:

def name_of_global_obj(xx):
    return [objname for objname, oid in globals().items()
            if id(oid)==id(xx)][0]

or, equivalently:

def name_of_global_obj(xx):
    for objname, oid in globals().items():
        if oid is xx:
            return objname