Tag: Programming

Summing Booleans For Fun And Profit

I came up with a IMHO nice piece of code while working with and getting to know Python.

incomplete_items = [
    item.quantity_ordered > item.quantity_delivered for item in order.items
]
if any(incomplete_items):
    do_something()

This feels clean and obvious. It might not be very efficient though. :/

has_incomplete_items = sum(
    item.quantity_ordered > item.quantity_delivered for item in order.items
)
if has_incomplete_items:
    do_something()

Doing it this way can be more efficient, since it can leverage generators and doesn’t need to go through the list again with 

any

. But using 

sum

  over booleans feels hackish and non-obvious … 🙁

MagicMock With Spec

Thanks to @immoralist I’ve learned a new Python testing trick. I didn’t know about the “spec” argument for MagicMock. m(
Let’s see an example:

from mock import MagicMock

class SomeModel(object):
    foo = "f**"
    bar = "b**"

m = MagicMock(spec=SomeModel)

Here we create a mock object which mimics the interface of 

SomeModel

  as we would expect, returning mock values for things we access.

>>> m.foo
<MagicMock name='mock.foo' id='4506756880'>
>>> m.bar
<MagicMock name='mock.bar' id='4506754192'>

Let’s see what happens if we call something else:

>>> m.baz
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File ".../env/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mock.py", line 658, in __getattr__
    raise AttributeError("Mock object has no attribute %r" % name)
AttributeError: Mock object has no attribute 'baz'

It will fail loudly while a mock object without a spec would have returned a mock value as it did in the previous example.

But the magic doesn’t end there. You can still set additional attributes/methods “by hand” and have them not fail even if they aren’t part of the original spec.

>>> m.baz = "bazzzzz"
>>> m.baz
'bazzzzz'

Learning new things makes me happy. 😀

Tripping Over Property Setters in Python

In Python there is a simple way to make methods behave like properties using the @property decorator. But this only covers the getter side of things. What if you want to have a setter function for this “property”? Well there is a way. 🙂
Consider the following example:

import json

class SomeModel(object):
  _foo = '{"foo":["bar", "baz"]}'

  @property
  def foo(self):
    return json.loads(self._foo)

  @foo.setter
  def foo_setter(self, new_value):
    self._foo = json.dumps(new_value)

m = SomeModel()

Now you can use the 

foo()

  method like a property.

>>> m.foo
{u'foo': [u'bar', u'baz']}

This is a simple way to have a property contain a JSON string but access it as a Python dict, doing (de-)serialization on the fly.
So what if you want to set the value using a dict?

>>> m.foo = ["foo", "bar"]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: can't set attribute

This is can easily trip up even seasoned Python developers. I’ve read code that did exactly this and I (as a novice) had to find out why the code failed. m(
The solution is quite simple … but “non-obvious” (as in: I wouldn’t have thought of that without consulting the docs) 🙁

  @foo.setter
  def foo(self, new_value)
    self._foo = json.dumps(new_value)

Notice the method name? The setter and the getter methods have to have the same name!