Question

I have the following class in python

class myTest:
    def __init__(self, str):
        self.str = str

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.str

and in some other file a instantiate myTest to try out the unicode() method

import myClass


c = myClass.myTest("hello world")

print c

as print out I get <myClass.myTest instance at 0x0235C8A0> however if I overrider __str__() I will get hello world as output. My question is, how should I write the overrider for __unicode__() if I want it to output string instead?

Answer 1

Generally it is done like this:

class myTest:
    def __init__(self, str):
        self.str = str

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.str
    def __str__(self):        
        return unicode(self).encode('utf-8')

This is because __unicode__ is not called implicitly in they way that __str__ and __repr__ are. It is called under the hood by the built-in function unicode, so if you don’t define __str__ you would have to do:

print unicode(c)