The motivation is that there are many cases where producing the full, round-trippable repr is possible, but would take up significant resources or be too huge to be useful for human consumption.

The built-in [reprlib module][1] certainly shows there's an interest for many built-in types, and I think arguably that same functionality is desirable for user types.

As mentioned in the subject a possible API could be:

class ValueObject(object):

    def __init__(self, content):

        self.content = content

    def __repr__(self):
        return '%s(%r)' % (self.__class__.__name__, self.content)

    def __short_repr__(self, size=None, depth=None):

        # TODO: should interpretation of size/depth be casual or strict?

        if size and len(self.content) > size:

            short_content = self.content[:size] + '...'
        else:
            pass  # TODO: could just return normal repr possibly
        return '<%s content=%r)' % (self.__class__.__name__, short_content)

Without something like this, there's no way to ask an object if it's repr is of manageable length, or how its repr could be meaningfully shortened. Usually I just chop out the middle and add an ellipsis, but as for the time spent generating that middle, I'll never get those cycles back.

Anyways, thanks for your attention, and happy Monday to all!

Mahmoud

https://github.com/mahmoud

https://twitter.com/mhashemi

http://sedimental.org

[1]: https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#func-repr
[2]: https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/reprlib.html

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