If you find this information useful, consider picking up a copy of my book, The Python Standard Library By Example.

Navigation

Table of Contents
Previous: readline – Interface to the GNU readline library
Next: Unix-specific Services

This Page

Examples

The output from all the example programs from PyMOTW has been generated with Python 2.7.8, unless otherwise noted. Some of the features described here may not be available in earlier versions of Python.

If you are looking for examples that work under Python 3, please refer to the PyMOTW-3 section of the site.

Now available for Python 3!

Buy the book!

rlcompleter – Adds tab-completion to the interactive interpreter¶

Purpose:	Adds tab-completion to the interactive interpreter
Available In:	1.5 and later

rlcompleter adds tab-completion for Python symbols to the interactive interpreter. Importing the module causes it to configure a completer function for readline. The only other step required is to configure the tab key to trigger the completer. All of this can be done in a PYTHONSTARTUP file so that it runs each time the interactive interpreter starts.

For example, create a file ~/.pythonrc containing:

try:
    import readline
except ImportError:
    # Silently ignore missing readline module
    pass
else:
    import rlcompleter
    readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Then set PYTHONSTARTUP to "~/.pythonrc". When you start the interactive interpreter, tab completion for names from the contents of modules or attributes of objects is activated.