Namespace resolution for auto-completion regarding utils.data.samplers

1

Hi everyone. I’ve recently stumbled upon this behavior in which when you load a sampler from utils.data.sampler you don’t get any autocompletion or namspace resolution (I don’t know if that’s the correct name). So basically if you do from torch.utils.data.sampler import [press tab key] you get nothing. Even from torch.utils. [press tab key] still gives something unrelated torch.utils.backcompat torch.utils.hooks. So basically one cannot find that .data is a namespace inside torch.utils, so basically you cannot explore what exists in the library unless you’ve seen before an example code which loads a sampler from that namespace. Is there a better way to achieve this type of exploration when you’re looking around the library trying to figure out what exists there?

Thanks!

2

I believe autocompletion is IDE (and maybe IDE plugin) dependent…

3

Sometimes, when the autocompletion doesn’t work in my IDE for whatever reason, I use e.g. dir(torch.utils.data.sampler) to get the classes and methods.
Sometimes it doesn’t show all classes, but I have no idea why or how the namespaces are resolved internally.

4

@ptrblck @SimonW thanks for the replies guys but the examples I gave about where not from any IDE they were directly from python/ipython shell environment. If you simply drop into a python shell and do from torch.utils.data. import [tab key]. You won’t get any auto-completion. And if you don’t know that samples exists in the first place you’ll have a hard time finding them.

5

I get your point. But this is still an IDE feature. The Python IDE and iPython IDE are still IDEs. Many text editors don’t do autocompletion by default.

As @ptrblck mentioned, it could be a dir problem. If so, we should definitely fix it.

6

@SimonW thanks for the reply but i’m bit confused on the terminology here. For me python IDE means entirely something different from the python/ipython REPL. Are they the same thing?
If you invoke python on the terminal, you get:

>>REPL

that’s what I would call a REPL and not an IDE. So just to make sure that I’m making my point clear here is that all the above that I mentioned refer to the REPL. Don’t know if that makes any difference but just to clarify things up.

Thanks!

7

Hmm, that’s strage, since the autocompletion works in IPython (REPL).
Sometimes Spyder has some problems with loading the correct classes.

repl_pytorch
repl_pytorch715×228 38.1 KB

8

Here’s what I get on a python REPL:

Python 3.6.4 |Anaconda, Inc.| (default, Mar 13 2018, 01:15:57)
[GCC 7.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import torch
>>> from torch.utils.
torch.utils.backcompat  torch.utils.hooks

I don’t see the data namespace.

even if I do:

from torch.utils.data import [tab key]

Returns no entries whatsoever.