Question

I’m going through the django tutorials and I was wondering what happens when you have 2 functions with the same name in views.py?

for example:

def results(request, poll_id):
   p = get_object_or_404(Poll, pk=poll_id)
   return render_to_response('polls/results.html', {'poll': p})

def results(request, poll_id):
    return HttpResponse("You're looking at the results of poll %s." % poll_id)

when i ran the code, the bottom function was the one that was called. How does this work?

Answer 1

In Python, methods and functions can take any number of arguments; which negates the need to have different function “signatures” to support different types of arguments passed; which is the common use case for function overloading. See 4.7.3. Arbitrary Argument Lists in the python documentation.

The reason the second method gets called is because you simply overwrite the method definition when you define it with the same name (and same argument list). For python, it is the same as:

>>> x = 1
>>> x = 'Hello'
>>> print x
Hello

You just re-defined the same method again, so it uses the last definition.