How to get meaningful network interface names instead of GUIDs with netifaces under Windows?

Question

I use the netifaces module.

import netifaces
print netifaces.interfaces()

but this shows the result below:

 [\         


        

Answer 1

We can also use Windows WMI:

import wmi

c = wmi.WMI()
qry = "select Name from Win32_NetworkAdapter where NetEnabled=True and NetConnectionStatus=2"

lst = [o.Name for o in c.query(qry)]
print(lst)

yields on my machine:

['Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller', 'VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1', 'VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet8', 'VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter']

MSDN: Win32_NetworkAdapter class