List all base classes in a hierarchy of given class?

Question

Given a class Foo (whether it is a new-style class or not), how do you generate all the base classes - anywhere in the inheritance hierarchy - it issubclass of?

Answer 1

inspect.getmro(cls) works for both new and old style classes and returns the same as NewClass.mro(): a list of the class and all its ancestor classes, in the order used for method resolution.

>>> class A(object):
>>>     pass
>>>
>>> class B(A):
>>>     pass
>>>
>>> import inspect
>>> inspect.getmro(B)
(<class '__main__.B'>, <class '__main__.A'>, <type 'object'>)

Answer 2

See the __bases__ property available on a python class, which contains a tuple of the bases classes:

>>> def classlookup(cls):
...     c = list(cls.__bases__)
...     for base in c:
...         c.extend(classlookup(base))
...     return c
...
>>> class A: pass
...
>>> class B(A): pass
...
>>> class C(object, B): pass
...
>>> classlookup(C)
[<type 'object'>, <class __main__.B at 0x00AB7300>, <class __main__.A at 0x00A6D630>]

Answer 3

inspect.getclasstree() will create a nested list of classes and their bases. Usage:

inspect.getclasstree(inspect.getmro(IOError)) # Insert your Class instead of IOError.

Answer 4

you can use the __bases__ tuple of the class object:

class A(object, B, C):
    def __init__(self):
       pass
print A.__bases__

The tuple returned by __bases__ has all its base classes.

Hope it helps!

Answer 5

Although Jochen's answer is very helpful and correct, as you can obtain the class hierarchy using the .getmro() method of the inspect module, it's also important to highlight that Python's inheritance hierarchy is as follows:

ex:

class MyClass(YourClass):

An inheriting class

• Child class
• Derived class
• Subclass

ex:

class YourClass(Object):

An inherited class

• Parent class
• Base class
• Superclass

One class can inherit from another - The class' attributed are inherited - in particular, its methods are inherited - this means that instances of an inheriting (child) class can access attributed of the inherited (parent) class

instance -> class -> then inherited classes

using

import inspect
inspect.getmro(MyClass)

will show you the hierarchy, within Python.

Answer 6

In python 3.7 you don't need to import inspect, type.mro will give you the result.

>>> class A:
...   pass
... 
>>> class B(A):
...   pass
... 
>>> type.mro(B)
[<class '__main__.B'>, <class '__main__.A'>, <class 'object'>]
>>>

attention that in python 3.x every class inherits from base object class.