On Aug 22, 10:17 pm, Jason Scheirer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 22, 8:50 pm, maestro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Why are these functions there? Is it somehow more idiomatic to use > > than to do obj.field ? > > Is there something you can with them that you can't by obj.field > > reference? > > You can generate them dynamically from strings. In some cases you > don't know until runtime what attributes you want to pull: > > def show_insides(obj): > for attr in dir(obj): > print "Attribute %r: %r" % (attr, getattr(obj, attr)) > > class hello(object): > a = 1 > b = 2 > > class goodbye(object): > c = 1 > d = 500 > > print show_insides(hello) > (...15 builtins...) > Attribute 'a': 1 > Attribute 'b': 2 > > print show_insides(goodbye) > (...15 builtins...) > Attribute 'c': 1 > Attribute 'd': 500 > > In this case, you can see that we pull the attributes of an object > using dir(), which yields a list of strings, then pull each attribute > we discover.
Might I add: avoid doing this if you don't have to. obj.field is the way to go about getting your object attributes 95% of the time. The 5% of your time when you are doing metaprogramming or other abuses of the object system are when you use get/setattr. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
