The dir( ) Function in Python

The dir() built-in function returns a sorted list of strings containing the names defined by a module.

The list contains the names of all the modules, variables and functions that are defined in a module. Following is a simple example −

Example

#!/usr/bin/python
# Import built-in module math
import math
content = dir(math)
print content

Output

When the above code is executed, it produces the following result −

['__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 'acos', 'asin', 'atan',
'atan2', 'ceil', 'cos', 'cosh', 'degrees', 'e', 'exp',
'fabs', 'floor', 'fmod', 'frexp', 'hypot', 'ldexp', 'log',
'log10', 'modf', 'pi', 'pow', 'radians', 'sin', 'sinh',
'sqrt', 'tan', 'tanh']

Here, the special string variable __name__ is the module's name, and __file__ is the filename from which the module was loaded.