Question

Purely a cosmetic thing, but when I create a class in python, how do I control its instances’ titles? e.g. for

class Foo():
    def __init__(self, name):
         self.name = name

I can then create an instance:

>> f = Foo('bar')
>> f
<Foo instance at 0x10ab41a28>

If I wanted that to return bar, what would I do? (In Django, you use the __unicode__ method of the class, but I’ve tried setting both __unicode__ and __str__ functions to return self.name, and while these work on their own, they don’t affect the value of the class.)

Answer 1

I usually define __str__ to return a string representation, and then return the string in the __repr__ method, like this:

>>> class Foo():
...     def __init__(self, name):
...          self.name = name
...     def __str__(self):
...          return '<Foo name=%s>' % self.name
...     def __repr__(self):
...          return str(self)
... 
>>> f = Foo('bar')
>>> f
<Foo name=bar>

For more info, see Difference between str and repr in Python