Using a tuple to pass aggregated date around is a Good Thing, but if you do it a lot or your tuple gets large then you should really use a class. Or should you?
NamedTuple lets you write code like this:
names = ("name", "age", "height")
person1 = NamedTuple(zip(names, ["James", "26", "185"]))
person2 = NamedTuple(zip(names, ["Sarah", "24", "170"]))
print person1.name
for i,name in enumerate(names): print name, ":", person2[i]
Okay, that's pretty ugly. But reading the comments of a related recipe led me to Ganesan Rajogpal's attrdict:
class attrdict(dict):
def __getattr__(self, name):
return self[name]
def __setattr__(self, name, value):
self[name] = value
data = attrdict(red=1, green=2, blue=3)
print data.red
data.black = 4
Much cleaner to use, as well as less code to implement. (Although not immutable, so you couldn't use an attrdict as a key in another dict.) Sort of a nice way to make an annonymous class-like structure for those times when you don't need the real thing. Sort of like a struct for those of you who cut your teeth on C.
There's more along these lines in the cookbook, but attrdict is the one I'm most likely to use.
Comments