Ytdyklly

Suppose I have valid Python source code, as a string:

code_string = """

# A comment.

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b

class Bar(object):

  def __init__(self):

    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]

""".strip()

Objective: I would like to obtain the lines containing the source code of the function definitions, preserving whitespace. For the code string above, I would like to get the strings

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b

and

  def __init__(self):

    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]

Or, equivalently, I'd be happy to get the line numbers of functions in the code string: foo spans lines 2-3, and __init__ spans lines 5-9.

Attempts

I can parse the code string into its AST:

code_ast = ast.parse(code_string)

And I can find the FunctionDef nodes, e.g.:

function_def_nodes = [node for node in ast.walk(code_ast)

                      if isinstance(node, ast.FunctionDef)]

Each FunctionDef node's lineno attribute tells us the first line for that function. We can estimate the last line of that function with:

last_line = max(node.lineno for node in ast.walk(function_def_node)

                if hasattr(node, 'lineno'))

but this doesn't work perfectly when the function ends with syntactic elements that don't show up as AST nodes, for instance the last ] in __init__.

I doubt there is an approach that only uses the AST, because the AST fundamentally does not have enough information in cases like __init__.

I cannot use the inspect module because that only works on "live objects" and I only have the Python code as a string. I cannot eval the code because that's a huge security headache.

In theory I could write a parser for Python but that really seems like overkill.

A heuristic suggested in the comments is to use the leading whitespace of lines. However, that can break for strange but valid functions with weird indentation like:

def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]



class Baz(object):

  def hello(self, x):

    return self.hello(

x - 1)



def my_type_annotated_function(

  my_long_argument_name: SomeLongArgumentTypeName

) -> SomeLongReturnTypeName:

  # This function's indentation isn't unusual at all.

  pass

A much more robust solution would be to use the tokenize module. The following code can handle weird indentations, comments, multi-line tokens, single-line function blocks and empty lines within function blocks:

import tokenize

from io import BytesIO

from collections import deque

code_string = """

# A comment.

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b



class Bar(object):

  def __init__(self):



    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]



  def test(self): pass

  def abc(self):

    '''multi-

    line token'''



def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]



class Baz(object):

  def hello(self, x):

    return self.hello(

x - 1)



def my_type_annotated_function(

  my_long_argument_name: SomeLongArgumentTypeName

) -> SomeLongReturnTypeName:

  # unmatched parenthesis: ( }

  pass

""".strip()

file = BytesIO(code_string.encode())

tokens = deque(tokenize.tokenize(file.readline))

lines = 

while tokens:

    token = tokens.popleft()

    if token.type == tokenize.NAME and token.string == 'def':

        start_line, start_column = token.start

        end_line, _ = token.end

        enclosures = 0

        while tokens:

            token = tokens.popleft()

            if token.type == tokenize.NL: # ignore empty lines

                continue

            if token.type == tokenize.OP and token.string in '([{':

                enclosures += 1

            _, column = token.start

            if column <= start_column and token.type != tokenize.INDENT and not enclosures:

                tokens.appendleft(token)

                break

            if token.type == tokenize.OP and token.string in ')]}':

                enclosures -= 1

            end_line, _ = token.end

        lines.append((start_line, end_line))

print(lines)

This outputs:

[(2, 3), (6, 11), (13, 13), (14, 16), (18, 21), (24, 26), (28, 32)]

Rather than reinventing a parser, I would use python itself.

Basically I would use the compile() built-in function, which can check if a string is a valid python code by compiling it. I pass to it a string made of selected lines, starting from each def to the farther line which does not fail to compile.

code_string = """

#A comment

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b



def bir(a, b):

  c = a + b

  return c



class Bar(object):

  def __init__(self):

    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]



def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]



""".strip()



lines = code_string.split('n')



#looking for lines with 'def' keywords

defidxs = [e[0] for e in enumerate(lines) if 'def' in e[1]]



#getting the indentation of each 'def'

indents = {}

for i in defidxs:

    ll = lines[i].split('def')

    indents[i] = len(ll[0])



#extracting the strings

end = len(lines)-1

while end > 0:

    if end < defidxs[-1]:

        defidxs.pop()

    try:

        start = defidxs[-1]

    except IndexError: #break if there are no more 'def'

        break



    #empty lines between functions will cause an error, let's remove them

    if len(lines[end].strip()) == 0:

        end = end -1

        continue



    try:

        #fix lines removing indentation or compile will not compile

        fixlines = [ll[indents[start]:] for ll in lines[start:end+1]] #remove indentation

        body = 'n'.join(fixlines)

        compile(body, '<string>', 'exec') #if it fails, throws an exception

        print(body)

        end = start #no need to parse less line if it succeed.

    except:

        pass



    end = end -1

It is a bit nasty because of the except clause without specific exceptions, which is usually not recommended, but there is no way to know what may cause compile to fail, so I do not know how to avoid it.

This will prints

def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]

def __init__(self):

  self.my_list = [

      'a',

      'b',

  ]

def bir(a, b):

  c = a + b

  return c

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b

Note that the functions are printed in reverse order than those they appear inside code_strings

This should handle even the weird indentation code, but I think it will fails if you have nested functions.

I think a small parser is in order to try and take into account this weird exceptions:

import re



code_string = """

# A comment.

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b

class Bar(object):

  def __init__(self):

    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]



def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]



class Baz(object):

  def hello(self, x):

    return self.hello(

x - 1)



def my_type_annotated_function(

  my_long_argument_name: SomeLongArgumentTypeName

) -> SomeLongReturnTypeName:

  # This function's indentation isn't unusual at all.

  pass



def test_multiline():

    """

    asdasdada

sdadd

    """

    pass



def test_comment(

    a #)

):

    return [a,

    # ]

a]



def test_escaped_endline():

    return "asdad 

asdsad 

asdas"



def test_nested():

    return {():[,

{

}

]

}

""".strip()



code_string += 'n'





func_list=

func = ''

tab  = ''

brackets = {'(':0, '[':0, '{':0}

close = {')':'(', ']':'[', '}':'{'}

string=''

tab_f=''

c_old=''

multiline=False

check=False

for line in code_string.split('n'):

    tab = re.findall(r'^s*',line)[0]

    if 'def ' in line and not func:

        func += line + 'n'

        tab_f = tab

        check=True

    if func:

        if not check:

            if sum(brackets.values()) == 0 and not string and not multiline:

                if len(tab) <= len(tab_f):

                    func_list.append(func)

                    func=''

                    c_old=''

                    c_old2=''

                    continue

            func += line + 'n'

        check = False

        for c in line:

            if c == '#' and not string and not multiline:

                break

            if c_old != '\':

                if c in ['"', "'"]:

                    if c_old2 == c_old == c == '"' and string != "'":

                        multiline = not multiline

                        string = ''

                        continue

                    if not multiline:

                        if c in string:

                            string = ''

                        else:

                            if not string:

                                string = c

                if not string and not multiline:

                    if c in brackets:

                        brackets[c] += 1

                    if c in close:

                        b = close[c]

                        brackets[b] -= 1

            c_old2=c_old

            c_old=c



for f in func_list:

    print('-'*40)

    print(f)

output:

----------------------------------------

def foo(a, b):

  return a + b



----------------------------------------

  def __init__(self):

    self.my_list = [

        'a',

        'b',

    ]



----------------------------------------

def baz():

  return [

1,

  ]



----------------------------------------

  def hello(self, x):

    return self.hello(

x - 1)



----------------------------------------

def my_type_annotated_function(

  my_long_argument_name: SomeLongArgumentTypeName

) -> SomeLongReturnTypeName:

  # This function's indentation isn't unusual at all.

  pass



----------------------------------------

def test_multiline():

    """

    asdasdada

sdadd

    """

    pass



----------------------------------------

def test_comment(

    a #)

):

    return [a,

    # ]

a]



----------------------------------------

def test_escaped_endline():

    return "asdad asdsad asdas"



----------------------------------------

def test_nested():

    return {():[,

{

}

]

}