[Tutor] hasattr()

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sun Oct 14 04:30:39 CEST 2012


On 14/10/12 05:29, Matthew Ngaha wrote:
> im trying to understand this hasattr function. i am supposed to pass in an
> object and an attribute name into its parametres... so im trying to get it
> to return True. Here's a quick test
>
> class Test:
>      def __init__(self):
>         self.att = "testing"


Okay, so you have a class that defines an attribute named "att".

>>>> e = Test()
>>>> hasattr(e, e.att)
> False

Break this down step by step. First you create an instance, "e", with an
attribute e.att. Python evaluates e.att to get the string "testing", then
looks up hasattr(e, "testing"). Does e have an attribute called "testing"?
No. So it returns False.


>>>> hasattr(e, "testing")
> False

Same here, except that you bypass the evaluation of e.att and enter the
string "testing" manually.

What you need to pass to hasattr (as well as its friends getattr and
setattr) is the *name* of the attribute, not its contents:


hasattr(e, "att")

will return True.



-- 
Steven


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