Question

I am using some open SNS webiste’s API, the python version is a binding to its JSON version, but I really can’t understand below, why do things like this?

def mentions(self):
    comments = self.api.mentions()
    for comment in comments:
        self.obj = comment
        mid = self.getAtt("id")
        text = self.getAtt("text")
        print "mentions---"+ str(mid) +":"+ text

Why not access comment’s own attribute but assign to self.obj?

Answer 1

Perhaps comment isn’t amenable to direct attribute access. If so…

It looks like the API was designed by a Java programmer. A more Pythonic solution — assuming you can’t access the attributes of comment directly — would be to rename the getAtt method to __getattr__ and write, e.g., mid = self.id.

But even then the idea of assigning each comment to self.obj in turn seems perverse. Some wrapper around comment would probably be better:

c = attrgetter(comment)
mid = c.id
⋮

In fact, this would be sufficiently concise that you would even bother with local variables:

c = attrgetter(comment)
print "mentions---"+ str(c.mid) +":"+ c.text