Rich comparison methods don't work in sets?

Gustavo Narea me at gustavonarea.net
Fri Jun 19 15:02:44 EDT 2009


Hello, everyone.

I've noticed that if I have a class with so-called "rich comparison"
methods
(__eq__, __ne__, etc.), when its instances are included in a set,
set.__contains__/__eq__ won't call the .__eq__ method of the elements
and thus
the code below:
"""
obj1 = RichComparisonClass()
obj2 = RichComparisonClass()

set1 = set([obj1])
set2 = set([obj2])

if obj1 == obj2:
    print "Objects 1 and 2 are equivalent"
else:
    print "Objects 1 and 2 aren't equivalent"

if set1 == set2:
    print "Sets 1 and 2 are equivalent"
else:
    print "Sets 1 and 2 aren't equivalent"
"""

Would output:
"""
Objects 1 and 2 are equivalent
Sets 1 and 2 aren't equivalent
"""

instead of:
"""
Objects 1 and 2 are equivalent
Sets 1 and 2 are equivalent
"""

How can I work around this? The only solution that comes to my mind is
to
write a function like this:
"""
def same_sets(set1, set2):
    if len(set1) != len(set2): return False
    for element1 in set1:
        found = False
        for element2 in set2:
            if element1 == element2:
                found = True
                break;
        if not found:
            return False
    return True
"""

But I see it pretty ugly; also I'd also have to roll out my own
"contains"
(e.g., `element in set`) function.

I expect and hope there's a pythonic way to do this. Does it exist?

Thanks in advance!



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