"Aliasing" an object's __str__ to a different method

[Jeffrey E. Forcier]

Thanks for all the additional replies thus far!

Apparently the issue, as stated implicitly or explicitly by most of  
you, is that new-style class instances essentially defer their magic  
methods to the class's static versions of same. This is good to know :)

Ironically, the reason I'm using new-style classes is that I only  
read up on them very recently, and was attempting to get myself into  
the habit of inheriting from 'object' by default. Go figure.

Anyway, to take a step back, the *actual* actual reason for my  
investigation into this issue is that I'm attempting to create a  
collection of classes representing HTML page/form elements, many of  
which are represented differently depending on whether they're in a  
"view" or "edit" state.

And ideally I wanted to be able to hold a collection of these objects  
and toggle them all to one state or the other, then bandy them about  
as if they were strings, e.g. mixing them with literal strings via str 
(obj).

Clearly there are at least a handful of ways to accomplish this, but  
the one that came to mind first was, as I said at the beginning, to  
define both behaviors on each object and then have the ability to  
point __str__ to one or the other. I suppose now I need to figure out  
which is more important, that ease-of-use of overriding __str__ or  
whatever benefits new-style classes give (something I'm still a bit  
unclear on).

Thanks again,
Jeff

--
Jeffrey E. Forcier
Junior Developer, Research and Development
Stroz Friedberg, LLC
15 Maiden Lane, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10038
[main]212-981-6540 [direct]212-981-6546
http://www.strozllc.com

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