Python : Know thy caller

A recipe to find out which function is the caller of the current function.

The caller function can be helpful for debugging — if there is no real debugger available. In terms of software engineering (loose coupling etc.) this should not be used in production code though.

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import inspect def callee(): return inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe())[1][1:4] def caller(): return inspect.getouterframes(inspect.currentframe())[2][1:4]

Example usage:

def anyfunction():
    print "Function %s called from function %s" % (callee(), caller())
def anotherfunction():
    anyfunction()

anotherfunction()

Output:

Function ('/tmp/caller.py', 11, 'anyfunction') called from function ('/tmp/caller.py', 14, 'anotherfunction')