deref in a string into an operand

[Peter Otten]

John Doe wrote:

> Foolish me; I examined the __builtin__ and found __getattribute__,
> along with '__mul__' '__add__', '__sub__' and '__div__'.
> 
> So using a builtin object like 'x' ...
> 
> x = 5
> attr = '__mul__'
> 
> print x.__getattribute__( attr )( 5 )
> 25
> 
> My program will store the operand as '__mul__' instead of '*', along with
> a health bit of comment.
 
However, this may sometimes fail:

>>> 1 + 1.0
2.0
>>> 1 .__add__(1.0)
NotImplemented

Consider using the operator module instead:

>>> import operator
>>> operator.add(1, 1.0)
2.0
>>> getattr(operator, "add")(1, 1.0)
2.0

Peter