Journey to Master Python (WIP)

You can dynamically respond to get instance attributes. python provides special method called __getattr__ which can be implemented to respond to get attributes

In the below example we are subclassing dict so that we can get elements as class attributes rather than with element accessor.

Dynamic get attributes

class BetterDict(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        super().__init__(*args)
    def __getattr__(self, key):
        if self.__contains__(key):
            return self.__getitem__(key)
        else:
            #For unknown key return empty dict
            return {}
addressbook = BetterDict()
addressbook['jason'] = {'name': 'Jason Bourne', 'age': 40}
print(addressbook.jason)
print(addressbook.ironman)

Setting unknown instance attributes

Extending the above example we can also set attributes using __setattr__. __setattr__ gets called when there is no such attribute to set. We can implement it for our purpose.

Dynamic set attributes

class BetterDict(dict):
    def __init__(self, *args):
        super().__init__(*args)
    def __getattr__(self, key):
        if self.__contains__(key):
            return self.__getitem__(key)
        else:
            #For unknown key return empty dict
            return {}
    def __setattr__(self, key, value):
        self.__setitem__(key, value)
addressbook = BetterDict()
print(addressbook.ironman)
addressbook.ironman = {'name' : 'Iron Man', 'age': 35}
print(addressbook.ironman)