[Tutor] generic repr method?

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Hi,

I've written a __repr__ method that is supposed to *always* work. That is, it returns an eval-able text representation of any class instance.
Will this really always work? I'd find it useful is this is standard behavior of Python. Or am I overlooking something?


import inspect

class X (object):

    def __init__(self, x=1, y='n'):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

    def __repr__(self):            
        code = self.__class__.__name__ + "("
        for arg in inspect.getargspec(self.__init__).args [1:]  :
            if isinstance(eval("self." + arg), basestring):
                code += ("%(" + arg + ")r, ")
            else:
                code += ("%(" + arg + ")s, ")
        code = code[:-2] + ")"
        return code % self.__dict__

x = X()
eval(repr(x))
 
Regards,
Albert-Jan


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