[IPython-user] win32com tab completion?

[Fernando Perez]

Matt Wilkie wrote:
>>Try dir(gp).  That's what tab-completion uses: if an object doesn't publish
>>its interface, it's really hard for tab-completion to find out about its
>>internals.  Tab-completion is limited to what dir(foo) will return.
> 
> 
> ah, I'm nix'd then. Oh, well couldn't hurt to ask. Now I guess I go
> hunting upstream to get gp to publish the interface.

Yup.  The problem is that objects may choose to define arbitrarily complex 
__getattr__ methods which look up internally held attributes, so that

foo.bar

is valid, even though 'bar' is nowhere to be found in dir(foo).  Since there 
is no way, a priori, to know whether foo.bar will succeed or not, tab 
completion has to operate on _some_ list of known quantities.

Cheers,

f