Wandering Thoughts archives

Initializing Python struct objects with optional defaults

Recently I was writing code to register names and their attributes. There were enough attributes that I didn't want to specify all of them all of the time, so I did the obvious Python thing: I made the register() function take a bunch of keyword arguments that had default values. The attributes are stored with a struct object, because I wanted an attrs.attribute syntax for accessing them.

The straightforward way to initialize the struct object was to write 'vi = ViewInfo(factory = factory, onDir = onDir, ...)', but that sort of repetition is annoying, especially when I had a perfectly good set of name/value pairs in the form of register()'s arguments. If only I could get at them.

It turns out that you can use the locals() dictionary for this, if you use it before you set any local variables in the function. So:

class ViewInfo(Struct):
  pass

def register(name, factory, onDir = False, \
             onFile = True, ...):
  vi = ViewInfo(**locals())
  view_dict[name] = vi

(I did not strictly need the name attribute in the ViewInfo data, but it doesn't do any harm and it meant I could use locals() straight.)

A similar pattern can be done directly in a struct class as:

class ViewInfo:
  def __init__(self, name, factory, \
               onDir = False, ...):
    for k, v in locals().items():
      if k != "self":
        setattr(self, k, v)

(You really want to exclude self, since circular references make the garbage collector work harder than necessary.)