Question

def mention_notifier(self):
    print self.stat_old


if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    self.stat_old = Set([])
    l = task.LoopingCall(mention_notifier).start(timeout)

This is the basic skeleton of my code. I want stat_old to be a global variable that doesn’t get re intialized every time I call mention_notifier. Thus, I did something like this. But got this error of ‘self’ not defined. Any clues how to go about this?

Answer 1

I don’t use Twisted, but from looking at the docs, something like this might work:

def mention_notifier(self):
    print self.stat_old

class Namespace(object): 
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    self=Namespace()
    self.stat_old = Set([])
    l = task.LoopingCall(mention_notifier,self).start(timeout)

Of course, here the variable name self should probably be changed to something else — by convention self is typically used inside of classes to reference the instance of the class in a method call …

It looks like LoopingCall can be given arguments to be passed along to the function (in this case, the Namespace object self is passed). Then inside the function, “self” is modified (as long as you don’t do something like self=... inside the function, you’re golden — self.attribute=... is completely fine)