Simulating call of instance like a list or tuple

[Brett Cannon]

I screwed up, pure and simple.  For  some reason I got it into my head
that they were returning the actual tuple value and not the
representational string.

I think I have  been on vacation too long.

-Brett



On Sun, 13 Jan 2002, Andrew Bennetts wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 12:33:52AM -0800, Brett Cannon wrote:
> > First, thanks to everyone who replied to my post.
> >
> > It seems everyone is thinking that I want __repr__ or __str__, which is in
> > the right  vein, but not quite it.  I want the same functionality, but I
> > want to be able to return something other than a string.  I don't think it
> > exists outside of the built-in classes.
>
> No, __repr__ *is* what you want.
>
> First, let's be perfectly clear -- is this the functionality you are
> referring to:
>
> >>> l = [1,2,3]
> >>> l
> [1, 2, 3]
> >>>
>
> Yes?
>
> Ok, now notice this:
>
> >>> repr(l)
> '[1, 2, 3]'
>
> That's right, repr returns the string representation, so that printing the
> value from repr:
>
> >>> print repr(l)
> [1, 2, 3]
>
> is the same as evaluating the object interactively:
>
> >>> l
> [1, 2, 3]
>
> You could also do:
>
> >>> print l
> [1, 2, 3]
>
> Note that this isn't "calling" the list -- that would be "l()", which gives
> this response:
>
> >>> l()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: object of type 'list' is not callable
>
> Does this explain things more clearly?  The point here is that the "[1, 2,
> 3]" you're seeing is not a list, it's the string representation of a list.
> I think that's where you're getting confused.
>
> I hope this has helped explain this for you.  If not, please post an example
> of where a list behaves differently, and we'll figure out where you (or we)
> are getting confused.
>
> -Andrew.
>
>
>