Question

I am working on a Python script that digs through a directory full of text files (Dungeon Crawl morgue files, if you’re wondering) and extracts and various values. When trying to do this the OOP way I have had some problems.

Here is the GameSummary class which takes in game_record_list – this is a List of each individual game records from which I can get the integer value record.gold.

class GameSummary:

    def __init__(self, game_record_list):
        self.game_record_list = game_record_list
        self.gold_summary = self.gold_report()

    def gold_total(self):
        total_gold = 0
        for record in self.game_record_list:
            total_gold += record.gold
        return total_gold

    def gold_report(self):
        report = "Total gold acquired: " + str(self.gold_total)
        return report

Later I instantiate GameSummary as master_summary and try to write the string returned from gold_report into a log file using:

log_file.write(master_summary.gold_summary)

What ends up being written to my text file, however, is:

“Total gold acquired: bound method GameSummary.gold_total of <main.GameSummary instance at 0x02262FD0>”

Why isn’t this method returning a string? Is the issue in gold_total or gold_report?

Answer 1

report = "Total gold acquired: " + str(self.gold_total)

should be

report = "Total gold acquired: " + str(self.gold_total())

Alternatively, gold_total could be made a property so it could be accessed like a field:

@property
def gold_total(self):
    ...

Then the first way would work fine.