Namedtuples: some unexpected inconveniences

[Deborah Swanson]

Gregory Ewing wrote, on Thursday, April 13, 2017 1:14 AM
> 
> Deborah Swanson wrote:
> > I don't exactly understand your point (2). If the 
> namedtuple does not 
> > have a label attribute, then getattr(record, label) will 
> get the error 
> > whether the name label holds the string 'label' or not.
> 
> You sound rather confused. Maybe the following interactive 
> session transcript will help.
> 
>  >>> from collections import namedtuple
>  >>> record = namedtuple('record', 'alpha,beta')
>  >>> r = record(1, 2)
>  >>> r
> record(alpha=1, beta=2)
>  >>> label = 'alpha'
>  >>> getattr(r, label)
> 1
>  >>> label = 'beta'
>  >>> getattr(r, label)
> 2
>  >>> label = 'gamma'
>  >>> getattr(r, label)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> AttributeError: 'record' object has no attribute 'gamma'
> 
> Can you see what's happening here? The expression
> 
>     label
> 
> is being evaluated, and whatever string it evaluates to is 
> being used as the attribute name to look up.
> 
> Now, I'm not sure exactly what you were doing to get the 
> message "'record' object has no attribute 'label'". Here are 
> a few possible ways to get that effect:
> 
>  >>> r.label
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> AttributeError: 'record' object has no attribute 'label'
> 
>  >>> getattr(r, 'label')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> AttributeError: 'record' object has no attribute 'label'
> 
>  >>> label = 'label'
>  >>> getattr(r, label)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> AttributeError: 'record' object has no attribute 'label'
> 
> Or maybe you did something else again. We would need to
> see your code in order to tell.
> 
> -- 
> Greg

And it's reproducing the code that's the roadblock to all of these
issues.

Rest assured I will get to the bottom of this, or at least come back
with the code to ask more questions about it and let you see what I had.
I want to see what's going on here too.

Might be a day or two though.

Deborah