cinspect is an attempt to extend Python's built-in inspect module to add "inspection" for Python's builtins and other objects not written in Python.

The project is inspired by pry-doc and tries to generate indexes of the sources for C-extensions, which are then used when obects are being inspected.

1. We use libclang's Python bindings to parse the C-code and generate indexes out of it.

2. When an object is inspected, we look up the required data from the indexes and use it.

NOTE: cinspect source code is only Python2 compatible. We have not looked at the compatibility of libclang's Python bindings with Python3.x.

cinspect depends on having libclang installed in the system, for indexing sources. If you can obtain the indexed sources from a different location, you will not require libclang.

Something like the following should do it, depending on which system you are on.

sudo apt-get install libclang1-3.5 libclang-common-3.5

The easiest way to install the package currently is to run (in a virtual environment).

python setup.py develop

The cinspect module currently exposes only a getsource and getfile, which are similar to equivalent functions in the built-in inspect module.

The package doesn't yet bundle any indexes, and you will need to run the indexer on your sources to index them. (In future, version specific indexes could be packaged, a la pry-doc).

The indexer is exposed as the cinspect-index command. You can run it as follows,

cinspect-index -I/usr/lib/clang/3.5/include \
               -I/home/punchagan/software/random/cpython/Include \
               -I/home/punchagan/software/random/cpython/ \

			   /home/punchagan/software/random/cpython/

Essentially, you tell cinspect-cindex the path to the directory you wish to index. Since we use libclang to index the sources, any additional arguments you pass to this script are passed on to libclang. To get the indexer to work, you will have to make sure that

1. libclang is able to find its own includes.
2. You pass-in the include dirs that the project you are indexing needs, to compile.

The indexes are currently saved at ~/.index.json. Once you have created the indexes, you can use the getsource or getfile functions exposed by cinspect, to inspect your objects.

We have a startup script for IPython, that monkey patches it, to enable it to use cinspect. Drop the script provided in utils/00-cinspect.py into your IPython startup directory.

cp utils/00-cinspect.py `ipython locate profile default`/startup

Now, ? and ?? will be patched to try and use the cinspect indexes, once you restart IPython (using the default profile).