Beginning Python - From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 9 ■ ■ ■ Magic Methods, Properties, and Iterators In Python, some names are spelled in a peculiar manner, with two leading and two trailing underscores. You have already encountered some of these (such as __future__, for example). This spelling signals that the name has a special significance—you should never invent such names for your own programs. One set of such names that is very prominent in the language is the set of magic (or special) method names. If one of your objects implements one of these methods, that method will be called under specific circumstances (exactly which will depend on the name) by Python. There is rarely any need to call these methods directly. This chapter deals with a few important magic methods (most notably the __init__ method and some methods dealing with item access, allowing you to create sequences or mappings of your own). It also tackles two related topics: properties (previously dealt with through magic methods, now handled by the property function), and iterators (which use the magic method __iter__ to enable them to be used in for loops). You’ll find a meaty example at the end of the chapter, which uses some of the things you have learned so far to solve a fairly difficult problem. Before We Begin . . . In Python 2.2, the way Python objects work changed quite a bit. I mentioned this briefly in a sidebar, “Types and Classes Then and Now,” in Chapter 7, and I discuss it again later in this chapter (in the section “Subclassing list, dict, and str”). This change has several consequences, most of which won’t be important to you as a beginning Python programmer. 1 One thing is worth noting, though: Even if you’re using a recent version of Python, some features (such as properties and the super function) won’t work on “old-style” classes. To make your classes “new-style,” you should (directly or indirectly) subclass the built-in class (or, actually, type) object. Consider the following two classes: 1. For a thorough description of the differences between old-style and new-style classes, see Chapter 8 in Alex Martelli’s Python in a Nutshell (O’Reilly & Associates, March 2003). 173
174 CHAPTER 9 ■ MAGIC METHODS, PROPERTIES, AND ITERATORS class NewStyle(object): more_code_here class OldStyle: more_code_here Of these two, NewStyle is a new-style class, while OldStyle is an old-style class. ■Note Rather than subclass a built-in type, you can make sure you’re using the same metaclass as they do. Metaclasses are the classes of other classes (or types)—a rather advanced topic. However, you can use the built-in metaclass called type to create new-style classes rather easily. Either you put the following assignment in the top-level scope of your module (close to the top), or in the class-scope of your class: __metaclass__ = type Putting it at the beginning of a module makes it easy to make all your classes new-style. For more information on metaclasses, you can take a look at the (somewhat technical) article called “Unifying types and classes in Python 2.2” by Guido van Rossum (http://python.org/2.2/descrintro.html), or you can do a Web search for the term “python metaclasses.” In this book, I have taken the conservative approach of subclassing object only where it is needed (because object did not exist before version 2.2), but if you do not specifically have to make your programs compatible with old versions of Python, I would advise you to make all your classes new-style, and consistently use features such as the super function (described in the section “Using the super Function,” later in this chapter). Constructors The first magic method we’ll take a look at is the constructor. In case you have never heard the word “constructor” before, it’s basically a fancy name for the kind of initializing method I have already used in some of the examples, under the name init. What separates constructors from ordinary methods, however, is that the constructors are called automatically right after an object has been created. Thus, instead of doing what I’ve been doing up until now: >>> f = FooBar() >>> f.init() constructors make it possible to simply do this: >>> f = FooBar() Creating constructors in Python is really easy; simply change the init method’s name from the plain old init to the magic version, __init__:
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Beginning Python From Novice to Pro
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Introduction A C program is like a
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572 APPENDIX C ■ ONLINE RESOURCES
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Index ■Symbols - operator 558 !=
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