CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.xpython-2.7
Paulo Costa
Paulo Costa

Reputation: 33

How To Make Class Default Returning Value A Dictionary

I hope the title is clear enough for my purpose, to be honest I did not try much because I didn't really knew where to go to, and I'm not even sure this is totally possible. I know its possible to override __str__ and __int__ to return values of those 2 types. I sure you're asking 'why not have a class function to return what you want', and sure its a reasonable question, but I wanted a cleaner way to do it.

I've searched for other similar questions and examples that might have helped but none really do what I intend. The closest I could get is from the example I tried below overriding __new__ and __repr__.

class student:
    def __init__(self, name, age):
        self.info = {'name': name, 'age': age}
    def __new__(self, name, age):
        return self.info
    def __repr__(self, name, age):
        return self.info
student_data = student('Rob', 18)

print(student_data)

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 0

Views: 613

Answers (2)

Kevin M Granger
Kevin M Granger

Reputation: 2545

If your goal is to make an object act like a dictionary, you can subclass dict itself, or perhaps even easier, subclass collections.UserDict.

import collections

class Student(collections.UserDict):
    def __init__(self, name, age):
        self.data = {'name': name, 'age': age}

student_data = Student('Rob', 18)

print(student_data)

Upvotes: 0

cs95
cs95

Reputation: 402423

You were close. Both __str__ and __repr__ must return a string. print will internally call your object's __str__ representation. So, just have your __str__ method return the string representation of self.info (IOW str(self.info)).

class Student:
    def __init__(self, name, age):
        self.info = {'name': name, 'age': age}

    def __repr__(self):
        return str(self.info)

    def __str__(self):
        return self.__repr__()


student_data = Student('Rob', 18)
print(student_data)
# {'name': 'Rob', 'age': 18}

Upvotes: 1

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