Making Variable Text Output More Pythonic?

[afrobeard]

Arnaud's code wont work if self.opt1 is None, an empty list, an empty
tuple, False, etc, because all these evaluate to false. They wont
print the internal state of these variables. [Just an informational
notice, this may be the behavior you expect]

Secondly, I'm not sure if you know the variable names from before hand
in which case Casey's approach will work, or you need to know them via
introspection. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pyint.html
[Scroll down to attributes].

On May 16, 1:44 am, Arnaud Delobelle <arno... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Casey <casey.mcgi... at gmail.com> writes:
> > Hi,
>
> > I have some classes that print variable outputs depending on their
> > internal state, like so:
>
> > def __str__(self):
> >     out = []
> >     if self.opt1: out += ['option 1 is %s' % self.opt1']
> >     if self.opt2: out += ['option 2 is %s' % self.opt2']
> >     ....
> >     return '\n'.join(out)
>
> > Is there any way to make this cleaner?
>
> Maybe.
>
> Have a dictionary of options rather than individual attributes;
> options not in the dictionary are not set. E.g.
>
> mask = {
>     'opt1': 'option 1 is %s',
>     'opt2': 'option 2 is %s',
>     ...
>     }
>
> def __str__(self):
>     return '\n'.join(mask[o] % v for o,v in self.options.iteritems())
>
> --
> Arnaud