How to make a class that acts like a string?

Question

I have a context manager that captures output to a string for a block of code indented under a with statement. This context manager yields a custom result object which will, when the block has finished executing, contain the captured output.

from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def capturing():
    "Captures output within a 'with' block."
    from cStringIO import StringIO

    class result(object):
        def __init__(self):
            self._result = None
        def __str__(self):
            return self._result

    try:
        stringio = StringIO()
        out, err, sys.stdout, sys.stderr = sys.stdout, sys.stderr, stringio, stringio
        output = result()
        yield output
    finally:
        output._result, sys.stdout, sys.stderr = stringio.getvalue(), out, err
        stringio.close()

with capturing() as text:
    print "foo bar baz",

print str(text)   # prints "foo bar baz"

I can't just return a string, of course, because strings are immutable and thus the one the user gets back from the with statement can't be changed after their block of code runs. However, it is something of a drag to have to explicitly convert the result object to a string after the fact with str (I also played with making the object callable as a bit of syntactic sugar).

So is it possible to make the result instance act like a string, in that it does in fact return a string when named? I tried implementing __get__, but that appears to only work on attributes. Or is what I want to do not really possible?

Answer 1

At first glance, it looked like UserString (well, actually MutableString, but that's going away in Python 3.0) was basically what I wanted. Unfortunately, UserString doesn't work quite enough like a string; I was getting some odd formatting in print statements ending in commas that worked fine with str strings. (It appears you get an extra space printed if it's not a "real" string, or something.) I had the same issue with a toy class I created to play with wrapping a string. I didn't take the time to track down the cause, but it appears UserString is most useful as an example.

I actually ended up using a bytearray because it works enough like a string for most purposes, but is mutable. I also wrote a separate version that splitlines() the text into a list. This works great and is actually better for my immediate use case, which is removing "extra" blank lines in the concatenated output of various functions. Here's that version:

import sys
from contextlib import contextmanager

@contextmanager
def capturinglines(output=None):
    "Captures lines of output to a list."
    from cStringIO import StringIO

    try:
        output = [] if output is None else output
        stringio = StringIO()
        out, err = sys.stdout, sys.stderr
        sys.stdout, sys.stderr = stringio, stringio
        yield output
    finally:
        sys.stdout, sys.stderr = out, err
        output.extend(stringio.getvalue().splitlines())
        stringio.close()

Usage:

with capturinglines() as output:
    print "foo"
    print "bar"

print output
['foo', 'bar']

with capturinglines(output):   # append to existing list
    print "baz"

print output
['foo', 'bar', 'baz']

Answer 2

How to make a class that acts like a string? Subclass str

import os
class LikeAStr(str):
    '''Making a class like a str object; or more precisely
    making a str subclass with added contextmanager functionality.'''

    def __init__(self, diff_directory):
        self._iwd = os.getcwd()
        self._cwd = diff_directory

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

    def __exit__(self, ext_typ, exc_value, traceback):
        try: os.chdir(self._iwd) # might get deleted within the "with" statement
        except: pass

    def __str__(self):
        return self._cwd

    def __repr__(self):
        return repr(self._cwd)


astr = LikeAStr('C:\\')

with LikeAStr('C:\\') as astr:
    print 1, os.getcwd()
    os.chdir( astr ) # expects str() or unicode() not some other class
    print 2, os.getcwd()
    #

# out of with block
print 3, os.getcwd()
print 4, astr == 'C:\\'

Output:

1 D:\Projects\Python\
2 C:\
3 D:\Projects\Python\
4 True

Answer 3

I don't believe there is a clean way to do what you want. text is defined in the modules' globals() dict. You would have to modify this globals() dict from within the capturing object:

The code below would break if you tried to use the with from within a function, since then text would be in the function's scope, not the globals.

import sys
import cStringIO

class capturing(object):
    def __init__(self,varname):
        self.varname=varname
    def __enter__(self):
        self.stringio=cStringIO.StringIO()
        self.out, sys.stdout = sys.stdout, self.stringio
        self.err, sys.stderr = sys.stderr, self.stringio        
        return self
    def __exit__(self,ext_type,exc_value,traceback):
        sys.stdout = self.out
        sys.stderr = self.err
        self._result = self.stringio.getvalue()
        globals()[self.varname]=self._result
    def __str__(self):
        return self._result


with capturing('text') as text:
    print("foo bar baz")

print(text)   # prints "foo bar baz"
# foo bar baz

print(repr(text))
# 'foo bar baz\n'

Answer 4

I think you might be able to build something like this.

import StringIO

capturing = StringIO.StringIO()
print( "foo bar baz", file= capturing )

Now 'foo bar baz\n' == capturing.getvalue()

That's the easiest. It works perfectly with no extra work, except to fix your print functions to use the file= argument.

Answer 5

How to make a class that acts like a string?

If you don't want to subclass str for whatever reason:

class StrBuiltin(object):
    def __init__(self, astr=''):
        self._str = astr

    def __enter__(self):
        return self

    def __exit__(self, ext_typ, exc_value, traceback):
        pass # do stuff

    def __str__(self):
        return self._str

    def __repr__(self):
        return repr(self._str)

    def __eq__(self, lvalue):
        return lvalue == self._str

    def str(self):
        '''pretend to "convert to a str"'''
        return self._str

astr = StrBuiltin('Eggs&spam')

if isinstance( astr.str(), str):
    print 'Is like a str.'
else:
    print 'Is not like a str.'

I know you didn't want to do str(MyClass) but MyClass.str() kind of implies, to me, that this class is expected to expose itself as a str to functions which expect a str as part of the object. Instead of some unexpected result of "who know's what would be returned by str( SomeObject ).