On Jan 12, 2012, at 8:33 AM, Anthony wrote: > On Thursday, January 12, 2012 10:59:09 AM UTC-5, Jonathan Lundell wrote: > It's an interesting idea, but URL just returns a string, and aside from being > a fairly big rewrite, it's likely that it would break existing code that > relies on it being a string. > > You could create your own object that takes the same arguments as URL and > stores them as attributes, and whose __str__ and __repr__ functions are the > actual call to URL(). > > Perhaps this isn't advisable or worthwhile, but maybe we could subclass str > so URL still returns a string but can also have attributes to store the > controller, function, etc. > > class URL(str): > def __new__(cls, a, c, f, etc.): > [build url string as usual] > url = str.__new__(cls, url_string) > url.controller = controller > url.function = function > etc. > return url >
David also wants to be able to edit the attributes of the resulting object, with the results reflected in the string, so it'd need to be a more elaborate object, hence the need for lazy evaluation via __str__. Setting that aside, though, your idea has the advantage of being compatible with the existing URL, while my version requires a separate object. (In yours, it'd be good to make the stored attributes read-only, to guard against someone assuming that they could be usefully edited.)
