How to get the variable names from the string for the format() method

Question

Lets say I have this line:

\"My name is {name}\".format(name=\"qwerty\")

I know that the variable name is name and so I can f

Answer 1

You can parse the format yourself with the string.Formatter() class to list all references:

from string import Formatter

names = [fn for _, fn, _, _ in Formatter().parse(yourstring) if fn is not None]

Demo:

>>> from string import Formatter
>>> yourstring = "My name is {myname}"
>>> [fn for _, fn, _, _ in Formatter().parse(yourstring) if fn is not None]
['myname']

You could subclass Formatter to do something more fancy; the Formatter.get_field() method is called for each parsed field name, for example, so a subclass could work harder to find the right object to use.