Subclassing the min() build-in function?

Fredrik Lundh fredrik at pythonware.com
Wed Nov 6 12:43:35 EST 2002


Peter Lorenzen wrote:

> I am using Jython to calculate a string like this:  "2+3+min(1,2,3)"
> from my Java pro-gram. This works beautifully. But my problem is that
> if a user wants to calculate min(1) Python considers this an error. I
> want it to return 1. If I could figure out how to subclass the min
> function

(subclass?  since when is "min" a class?)

to override a builtin function, you can do something like
this:

import __builtin__

builtin_min = __builtin__.min

def min(*args):
    try:
        return builtin_min(*args)
    except TypeError:
        if len(args) == 1:
            return args[0]
        raise

__builtin__.min = min

</F>

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