Is there a "magic method" to access a list defined within a class through instance[0] rather than instance.list[0]?

Question

If I had the code:

names = ["Dave", "John", "Bob"]

and I wanted to get Dave from names I would do:

names[0]

If I now had the code

class Friends:
    def __init__(self, *people):
        self.names = []
        for v in people:
            self.names.append(v)

names = Friends("Dave", "John", "Bob")

to get Dave now I would have to do:

names.names[0]

Is there a magic method or something like that so that I can do:

names[0]

again and get Dave?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 06 '20 at 11:13

5

Yes, it's called __getitem__ as in:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self):
        self.names = ["john", "arthur"]

    def __getitem__(self, i):
        return self.names[i]

print(MyClass()[0])
# john

edited Oct 06 '20 at 11:13

Tomerikoo

18,379
16
47
61

answered Oct 06 '20 at 11:08

qmeeus

2,341
2
12
21

Thank you very much. Is there a list anywhere of all the magic methods bar doing dir(class) – Timothy Bowen Oct 06 '20 at 11:38
1

here you go: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#special-method-names – qmeeus Oct 06 '20 at 12:18

Is there a "magic method" to access a list defined within a class through instance[0] rather than instance.list[0]?

1 Answers1