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I have a class that is defined by a restricted set of values. Its instances need to be comparable to other instances of the class, but I want to be very explicit about which values it can take on. I initially defined these in a dictionary but then came across enums and prefer this option because just dumping everything in a dict at the top of the module looked a bit bad.

However I am having a problem with the enums now. I want them to be rank ordered so that I can carry out operations on instances of the class, like comparing to other instances. But I also want to have a "human readable" representation, and the class itself needs to be instantiated EITHER based on the values of those enums or as a combination of the abbreviations. What I have at the moment feels like a complete spaghetti:

class Day(IntEnum):
    MONDAY = 1 # mon
    TUESDAY = 2 # tue
    WEDNESDAY = 3 # wed

class DayAbbrev(Enum):
    MONDAY = 'mon'
    TUESDAY = 'tue'
    WEDNESDAY = 'wed'

class DayWeather(Enum):
    RAIN = 'rainy'
    SUN = 'sunny'

class SomeDay:
    def __init__(self, abbrev=None, day=None, weather=None):
        self.day = day or Day[DayAbbrev(abbrev.split('-')[1]).name].value
        self.weather = weather or DayWeather(abbrev.split('-')[0]).value
        self.abbrev = abbrev or '-'.join([DayWeather(weather).value, DayAbbrev[Day(1).name].value]) # e.g. sunny-mon, rainy-tue

sunnymon = SomeDay(day=1, weather='sunny') # Define based on ONLY valid enum values
rainytue = SomeDay('rainy-tue') # Define based on human-readable

In short, I don't want to use dictionaries because it feels suboptimal compared to enum classes. But the Day enum should have both rank (integer) AND a human readable string representation. I could only accomplish this by creating a "helper" enum class (DayAbbrev), to help build this representation.

I saw a way to add attributes to enums, but I'm overall a bit unsure if this is appropriate for my needs, and it also adds more spaghetti when trying to access enum values/names. Am I misusing enums? If not, is there a better way to accomplish what I'm trying? Is the linked post what I should do here?

crabulus_maximus
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  • The accepted answer from the author of `enum` in the linked question has a relatively clean solution as long as you're willing to use `aenum` or `enum34` instead. Is there a reason why you can't or don't want to adopt it? – blhsing Aug 02 '22 at 08:45
  • I am not sure in the first place if enum is the way to go here, and before I install additional libraries I want to be sure that it is the best approach – crabulus_maximus Aug 02 '22 at 08:53

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