I want to overwrite the get method for a variable in a class. (I'm not sure how to explain it otherwise.)
I've tried looking on Google, but nothing really helped me.
My code:
class Class():
self.foo = ['foo','bar']
print(Class().foo)
I want to make it so it will print out ' '.join(Class().foo) by default instead of just Class().foo.
Is there something that you can add to the code to make it like that?
You probably want to use the @property wrapper instead of defining foo as an attribute. You can store the parameters you want to print in a private class variable and then define the behavior of the foo to return the string join.
class Class:
_foo = ['foo', 'bar']
@property
def foo(self):
return ' '.join(self._foo)
print(Class().foo)
# prints:
foo bar
You can override __getattribute__ to do that:
class Thingy:
def __init__(self):
self.data = ['huey', 'dewey', 'louie']
self.other = ['tom', 'jerry', 'spike']
def __getattribute__(self, attr):
if attr == 'data':
return ' '.join(super().__getattribute__(attr))
else:
return super().__getattribute__(attr)
print(Thingy().data)
print(Thingy().other)
Output:
huey dewey louie
['tom', 'jerry', 'spike']
Python 2 version:
class Thingy(object):
def __init__(self):
self.data = ['huey', 'dewey', 'louie']
self.other = ['tom', 'jerry', 'spike']
def __getattribute__(self, attr):
if attr == 'data':
return ' '.join(super(Thingy, self).__getattribute__(attr))
else:
return super(Thingy, self).__getattribute__(attr)
print(Thingy().data)
print(Thingy().other)
Note that it is easy to get into infinite loops with overriding __getattribute__, so you should be careful.
There's almost certainly a less scary way to do this, actually, but I can't think of it right now.
