I am just getting started with OOP, so I apologise in advance if my question is as obvious as 2 2. :)

Basically I created a class that adds attributes and methods to a panda data frame. That's because I am sometimes looking to do complex but repetitive tasks like merging with a bunch of other tables, dropping duplicates, etc. So it's pleasant to be able to do that in just one go with a predefined method. For example, I can create an object like this:

mysupertable = MySupperTable(original_dataframe)

And then do:

mysupertable.complex_operation()

Where original_dataframe is the original panda data frame (or object) that is defined as an attribute to the class. Now, this is all good and well, but if I want to print (or just access) that original data frame I have to do something like

print(mysupertable.original_dataframe)

Is there a way to have that happening "by default" so if I just do:

print(mysupertable)

it will print the original data frame, rather than the memory location?

I know there are the str and rep methods that can be implemented in a class which return default string representations for an object. I was just wondering if there was a similar magic method (or else) to just default showing a particular attribute. I tried looking this up but I think I am somehow not finding the right words to describe what I want to do, because I can't seem to be able to find an answer.

Thank you! Cheers

CodePudding user response：

In your MySupperTable class, do:

class MySupperTable:

    # ... other stuff in the class

    def __str__(self) -> str:
        return str(self.original_dataframe)

That will make it so that when a MySupperTable is converted to a str, it will convert its original_dataframe to a str and return that.

CodePudding user response：

When you pass an object to print() it will print the object's string representation, which under the hood is retrieved by calling the object.__str__(). You can give a custom definition to this method the way that you would define any other method.