[Tutor] access class through indexing?

[Alex Hall]

On 8/4/10, Jerry Hill <malaclypse2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Alex Hall <mehgcap at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> Further to my questions about overriding builtin methods earlier, how
>> would I make a class able to be accessed and changed using index
>> notation? For example, take the following:
>> deck=CardPile(52) #creates a new deck of cards
>> print(len(deck)) #prints 52, thanks to my __len__ function
>> for c in deck: print c #also works thanks to __iter__
>> print(deck[4]) #fails with a list index out of range error
>> How would I get the last one working? I tried __getattr__(self, i),
>> but it did not work. I want to be able to get an arbitrary item from
>> the "pile" of cards (which can be a deck, a hand, whatever), and/or
>> set an element. A "pile" is just a list of Card objects, so I would
>> only need to use sequence indexing, not mapping functions.
>>
>
> Implement __getitem__(self, key) (See
> http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#emulating-container-types )
>
> If you want to support slicing (access like deck[0:10]), you'll need to
> handle getting a slice object as the key in addition to accepting an integer
> key.
>
> If a pile is really "just" a list of cards, you may want to look into
> inheriting from list instead of re-implementing all of the functionality on
> your own.
I tried this first, by typing
class Pile(list):
Doing this does not seem to work, though, since creating a pile of
size 52 results in a list of size 0, unless I include the __len__
function. I thought putting (list) in my class definition would
automatically give me the functions of a list as well as anything I
wanted to implement, but that does not seem to be the case.

>
> --
> Jerry
>


-- 
Have a great day,
Alex (msg sent from GMail website)
mehgcap at gmail.com; http://www.facebook.com/mehgcap