How to retrieve a variable's name in python at runtime?

Question

Is there a way to know, during run-time, a variable's name (from the code)? Or do variable's names forgotten during compilation (byte-code or not)?

e.g.:

>>>  vari = 15
>>>  print vari.~~name~~()
'vari'

Note: I'm talking about plain data-type variables (int, str, list etc.)

Answer 1

Variable names don't get forgotten, you can access variables (and look which variables you have) by introspection, e.g.

>>> i = 1
>>> locals()["i"]
1

However, because there are no pointers in Python, there's no way to reference a variable without actually writing its name. So if you wanted to print a variable name and its value, you could go via locals() or a similar function. ([i] becomes [1] and there's no way to retrieve the information that the 1 actually came from i.)