Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Implementing UserString


Just like UserDict and UserList, UserString is a string wrapper that allows easier subclassing of strings due to providing the underlying string as an attribute. The preferred way to do this is to subclass string directly; this class is provided mainly due to backwards-compatibility or simple cases where subclassing string is overkill for functionality.

While all string methods are available, such as UserDict and UserList, UserString adds the data attribute for easy access to the underlying string object. The contents of UserString are initially set to a copy of some type of sequence; the sequence can be bytes, a string, another UserString or subclass, or any other sequence object that can be converted to a string.

How to do it...

  1. userstring_import.py is simple in that it shows how to create a method to append a sequence to a string, much like adding more items to a list:
      >>> from collections import UserString
      >>> class AppendString(UserString...