__getattr__ weirdness

[Stephan Diehl]

Greg Brunet wrote:

> In adding the ability to refer to field values using dbfFile.field
> notation, I learned how to use __getattr__ and __setattr__ .  After some
> trial and error, I got it working.  But as part of my trials, I added
> some print statements to debug stuff.  The ones I added to __setattr__
> work as expected, but the one in __getattr__ seems to get called just
> under 1000 times for every __getattr__ call!
> 
> Something is obviously not right here - but I'm at a loss to understand
> what's going on.  I've pared down my code to still show it happening &
> included it below.  If you run this program & pipe the output to a file,
> you'll get just under 14000 debug lines.  Any ideas?  Thanks!
> 

Within the __getattr__ method, you can't just do normal attribute access as
this will trigger another call to __getattr__, so you where stuck in an
infinite loop.
try to access the required attribute directly from the __dict__

def __getattr__(self, key):
        """ Return DBF record values by field name """
        print "_ga: " + key
        try:
#            return self._rec[self._fldNames.index(key.upper())]
                         ^^^^
             return self.__dict__['_rec'][self._fldNames.index(key.upper())]
        except:
            raise AttributeError("Unknown Field: %s" % ( key ))

Hope that helps

Stephan