subclassing str

[Thomas Lotze]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:30:43 -0400, Russell Blau wrote:

> I think you need to use __new__() instead of __init__(), like so:

Thanks, that did the trick.

>>>> class SpecialString(str):
>     def __new__(cls, seq):
>         if isinstance(seq, SpecialString):
>             return str.__new__(cls, str(seq)[1:-1])
>         else:
>             return str.__new__(cls, seq)

I found it's actually possible to say seq[:] instead of str(seq)[1:-1],
which is less dependent on the exact format of the fancy representation.

So seq[:] seems to be a "trick" for getting at a sequence as it is,
without honouring its (string) representation. Thinking further, I wonder
what to do on non-sequence types, and whether there isn't a way to get to
an object's core that doesn't look like a trick. Or is it not all that
tricky after all?

> For more info, see http://www.python.org/2.2.1/descrintro.html#__new__

Thanks for the pointer.

-- 
Viele Grüße,
Thomas