Simon Willison’s Weblog

wat (via) This is a really neat Python debugging utility. Install with pip install wat-inspector and then inspect any Python object like this:

from wat import wat
wat / myvariable

The wat / x syntax is a shortcut for wat(x) that's quicker to type.

The tool dumps out all sorts of useful introspection about the variable, value, class or package that you pass to it.

There are several variants: wat.all / x gives you all of them, or you can chain several together like wat.dunder.code / x.

The documentation also provides a slightly intimidating copy-paste version of the tool which uses exec(), zlib and base64 to help you paste the full implementation directly into any Python interactive session without needing to install it first.