Question

What must I do to use my objects of a custom type as keys in a Python dictionary (where I don’t want the “object id” to act as the key) , e.g.

class MyThing:
    def __init__(self,name,location,length):
            self.name = name
            self.location = location
            self.length = length

I’d want to use MyThing’s as keys that are considered the same if name and location are the same.
From C#/Java I’m used to having to override and provide an equals and hashcode method, and promise not to mutate anything the hashcode depends on.

What must I do in Python to accomplish this ? Should I even ?

(In a simple case, like here, perhaps it’d be better to just place a (name,location) tuple as key – but consider I’d want the key to be an object)

Answer 1

You need to add 2 methods, note __hash__ and __eq__:

class MyThing:
    def __init__(self,name,location,length):
        self.name = name
        self.location = location
        self.length = length

    def __hash__(self):
        return hash((self.name, self.location))

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return (self.name, self.location) == (other.name, other.location)

    def __ne__(self, other):
        # Not strictly necessary, but to avoid having both x==y and x!=y
        # True at the same time
        return not(self == other)

The Python dict documentation defines these requirements on key objects, i.e. they must be hashable.