On Sat, 2006-04-29 at 14:49 +0200, Petar Marić wrote: > Looking through some recent changes I noticed that some M-R code uses > __repr__ and some new checkins use __str__ > > Is there anything we need to know?
Short answer: You need to know that Django is coming around to the Pythonic way of doing things. :-) Use __str__ where you want a friendly string to appear. Don't use __repr__ where you should be using __str__. Longer answer: (you probably know all this, but let's get it in the archives anyway)... In general (in Python), __str__ is a method that returns a user-friendly, human-readable string representing the class. __repr__ returns something that is lower-level, more machine processable (the Python docs recommend that __repr__ either returns a string that can be used as a Python expression to recreate the class, or a string of the form "<...some useful description...>"). In Django terms, this means that the useful string you see in Admin classes and elsewhere should really be the thing returned by __str__ and that __repr__ should be left alone to return something like "<Entry object>". A while back now, changes were checked into the admin component and elsewhere to ensure that __str__ was used wherever necessary (note that __str__ falls back to using __repr__ if the former is not defined, so the change was backwards compatible). If anything remains that should be presenting a user readable string and it is using a %r formatter or calling repr() explicitly, that is a bug. However, it was not deemed high priority to go back and retrofit all the existing code to implement __str__ instead of __repr__, since there is so much else to do. You will notice, however, that some of Adrian's recent checkins as he is proofreading the documentation change the suggestion so that people are encouraged to use __str__ where appropriate. Cheers, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
