[Tutor] question about operator overloading

Albert-Jan Roskam fomcl at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 6 13:05:06 CET 2012


From: Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>
To: tutor at python.org 
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2012 1:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Tutor] question about operator overloading

Alan Gauld wrote:
>> On 05/03/12 21:25, Dave Angel wrote:
>> 
>>> It's not clear what __add__() should mean for physical files.
>> 
>> My guess would be similar to the cat operator in Unix:
>> 
>> $ cat file1, file2 > file3
>> 
>> is equivalent to
>> 
>> file3 = file1 + file2
>> 
>> But of course, thats just my interpretation of file addition...
>
>I think that's what Albert-Jan is probably thinking, but the two models are not quite the same. I think that what he wants is probably closer to something like the fileinput module. I think what he wants is to avoid this:
>-----> First off, thank you all for your replies, including the replies after this mail. And sorry for top-posting in an earlier mail
>-----> And yes indeed Steven and Alan, this is what I had in mind.
>for f in (file1, file2, file3, file4):
>    for record in f:
>        process(record)
>
>in favour of this:
>
>all_the_files = file1 + file2 + file3 + file4  # merge file contents
>for record in all_the_files:
>    process(record)
>
>Albert-Jan, am I close? If not, please explain what you are trying to accomplish.
>----> What I had in mind was something like Peter Otten suggested:
>merged = file1 + file2
>merged.save_as(filename)
>Your solution looks intuitive, but won't "all_the_files" become very large if file1 through file4 contain, say, 100 billion values each?
>
>If the files are small, the easy way is to just read their contents, add them together as strings or lists, and then process the lot. But if the files are big, or you want to process them on-demand instead of up-front, you need an approach similar to fileinput.
>----> see above. Btw, contrary to what somebody in this thread said, Spss files are binary files, not text files.
>
>Personally, all these Reader and Append objects make my brain hurt, and I hardly ever use operator overloading, except perhaps for numeric types. Reader objects, I can just get. But "Append" objects?
>
>This may be useful:
>
>http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html
>----> Nice one ;-))
>
>and also itertools:
>
>
>from itertools import chain
>merged = chain(file1, file2, file3, file4)
>for record in merged:
>    process(record)
>----> Very, *very* useful function, thank you!
>----> this is (incomplete) code that I created without bothering about __add__:
>with SavWriter(mergedSavFileName, varNames, varTypes) as sav_merged:
>  for savFileName in glob.glob("d:/temp/*.sav"):
>    with SavReader(savFileName) as sav_r:
>      header = sav_r.next()
>      for row in sav_r:
>        sav_merged.writerow(row)
>http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577811-python-reader-writer-for-spss-sav-files-linux-mac-/
>---> Maybe I am making my life too difficult by trying to use __add__?
>
>-- Steven
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