overriding setting

[Francesco Guerrieri]

Hello,
this is my first post to the list :-) I've looked around a bit before
asking, and since I haven't found... I'm here to ask my question.

I'm trying to ovveride attribute setting, but I haven't still found
the right way to use all the fancy __get__, __set__ and
__getattribute__ :-)

I would like to retain initialization of an object by use of the = and
not as a function call. A simple example is this:

I want to define an "enhanced" list class, whose items will be other
(built in) lists and providing a "padding" method which fills all the
contained lists to the same lenght.
An example could be:

class myList(list):
    def __init__(self):
        self._max = None
        list.__init__(self)
    def pad(self):
        for item in self:
                if type(item)== list:
	    while len(item) < self._max:
	        item.append("")

Now the question is this:
I would like to initialize such an object in this way:
a = myList()
a = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6, 7]]
a.pad()
# and now a _should_ contain [[1, 2, 3, ""], [4, 5, 6, 7]]


Obviously this doesn't work, because when at the second line I do the
initialization, type(a) becomes <type 'list'>, and so I get the
expected AttributeError since pad cannot be found.

A possible solution could be to create a container class, intercepting
every attribute accession with __getattribute__.
In this case I should refer to Container.myFirstList,
Container.mySecondList, which is ugly because of the need to refer to
Container first...(not to mention that I'm still working on making the
__getattribute__ work properly... :-) )


Do you have any suggestions? or maybe I should simply stop trying to
do that and resort to adding some sort of insert or append method
(this is what I have done for the time being, but I found this
solution less appealing and nice ...)

thanks in advance,
Francesco
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