When writing a test suite for a little project I'm working on (multi-part blog post forthcoming), I wanted to return an array of objects from a function. Since they were only going to hold some values that would be passed to another function and then forgotten, I didn't feel like writing a proper class for them. The standard way would be to return a tuple or a dictionary, but I prefer the attribute access notation (foo.bar) to indexing (foo["bar"]), especially when sending the object to some other function that doesn't really care to keep track of what's a normal object and what just happens to be a dictionary because I was lazy.
So, what can be done? Turns you you can both have your cake and eat it too.
class improvise(object):
def __init__(self, **kws):
for (name, value) in kws.items():
setattr(self, name, value)
This little class takes keyword arguments to its constructor, and assigns each key/value pair as attributes on the instance. Use it like this: improvise(from_user=from_user, subject=subject, query=query), and the caller then gets an object that can be used like this: message.subject. Since the class doesn't care about which keyword arguments are used, it can be re-used by every function that wants to return objects without having to declare classes for them.
Chalk up one more for the flexibility of Python. Which, by the way, zooms.
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