we often use this double underscore prefix for internal methods of our classes. This usually raises a W0212 during unit-testing, because we call the proctected methods directly e.g. TestClass().__my_private_method().
I know that in Python there are no private methods. Nevertheless I find this practice of using the underscore prefix good for structural reasons, e.g., it makes it quite obvious to other developers how to use a class.
Now I found this fix for the W0212-Warning from the phoenix-github-page:
class Foo:
def __bar(self):
pass
def baz(self):
return self.__bar()
foo = Foo()
foo.baz()
Based on this you could create a method for unittest without disabling W0212 like this:
class SomeClass:
""" some docstring
"""
def __init__(self) -> None:
self.myattr = 1
def __my_protected_method(self):
return self.myattr + 1
def __another_protected_method(self):
return self.myattr + 2
def method_for_unittests(self, method_name):
if method_name == "my_protected_method":
return self.__my_protected_method()
if method_name == "another_protected_method":
return self.__another_protected_method()
return None
This seems like a nicer solution than using a seperate .pylintrc (suggested here). This begs the following questions:
- Does my solution make sense or should we just stick with
#pylint: disable=protected-access? - Or do you maybe have a better solution using a special decorator? I saw something here, which made me curious. I have little experience writing decorators, therefore the comparatively naive question.
