Question

I know this question sounds very basic. But I can’t find it using Google. I know that there are dictionaries that look like

o = {
  'a': 'b'
}

and they’re accessed with o['a']. But what are the ones that are accessed as o.a called? I know they exist because I’m using optparse library and it returns an object accessible like that.

Answer 1

You can not access dicts using the ‘.’ unless you implement your own dict type by deriving from dict and providing access through the ‘.’ notation by implementing the __getattribute__() API which is in charge for performing attribute style access.

See http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__getattribute__