This challenge write-up first appeared on PyBites.

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Hi Pythonistas, a new week, a new 'bite' of Python coding! We wrote an article for Dan Bader's Python blog: Enriching Your Python Classes With Dunder (Magic, Special) Methods. We hope you like it. To put dunders into practice we dedicate this week's code challenge to it.

What Are Dunder Methods?

To quote from our guest post:

In Python, special methods are a set of predefined methods you can use to enrich your classes. They are easy to recognize because they start and end with double underscores, for example __init__ or __str__. .... This elegant design is known as the Python data model and lets developers tap into rich language features like sequences, iteration, operator overloading, attribute access, etc.

The challenge

• Basic: take an existing class you wrote or write one from scratch (other than Account), implementing at least construction, object representation and iteration using special methods.

• Intermediate to Advanced: implement one or more of the other language features discussed in the article: operator overloading, method invocation, context management. And/or look at the data model documentation and try to implement one or more dunders not discussed in the article: attribute access, metaclasses or coroutines for example.

• Bonus: write some tests to verify the dunders you have implemented behave as expected.

Getting ready

See our INSTALL doc how to fork our challenges repo to get cracking.

This doc also provides you with instructions how you can submit your code to our community branch via a Pull Request (PR). We will feature your PRs in our end-of-the-week challenge review (previous editions).

New PR template

Note that when you do a PR you should see a short template asking for some meta data. We implemented that as part of code challenge 23 to track our challenges and over time enrich our Challenges page.

Feedback

If you have ideas for a future challenge or find any issues, please contact us or open a GH Issue.

Last but not least: there is no best solution, only learning more and better Python. Good luck!

Keep Calm and Code in Python!

-- Bob and Julian