Installation

pip install repr

This package contains a single module magic_repr called so to not conflict with standart python’s repr.

Reasoning

What do you think each time, writing such code?

def __repr__(self):
    return """
Issue(changelog={self.changelog},
      type={self.type},
      comment={self.comment},
      created_at={self.created_at},
      resolved_at={self.resolved_at})""".format(self=self).strip().encode('utf-8')

Isn’t this much better and readable?

__repr__ = make_repr('changelog', 'type', 'comment', 'created_at', 'resolved_at')

And this produces much nicer output:

<Issue changelog=<Changelog namespace=u'python'
                            name=u'geocoder'
                            source=u'https://github.com/DenisCarriere/geocoder'>
       type=u'wrong-version-content'
       comment=u'AllMyChanges should take release notes from the web site.'
       created_at=datetime.datetime(2016, 6, 17, 6, 44, 52, 16760, tzinfo=<UTC>)
       resolved_at=None>

<Foo bars={1: <Bar first=1
                   second=2
                   third=3>,
           2: <Bar first=1
                   second=2
                   third=3>,
           u'три': <Bar first=1
                        second=2
                        third=3>}>

Usage

For simple cases it is enough to call make_repr without arguments. It will figure out which attributes object has and will output them sorted alphabetically.

You can also specify which attributes you want to include in “representaion”:

from magic_repr import make_repr

__repr__ = make_repr('foo', 'bar')

And to specify a function to create a value for an attribute, using keywords:

from magic_repr import make_repr

class Some(object):
    def is_active(self):
        return True

Some.__repr__ = make_repr(active=Some.is_active)

Pay attention, that in this case __repr__ was created after the class definition. This is because inside of the class it can’t reference itself.

Documentation

https://python-repr.readthedocs.io/

Development

To run the all tests run:

tox

Note, to combine the coverage data from all the tox environments run:

set PYTEST_ADDOPTS=--cov-append
tox

PYTEST_ADDOPTS=--cov-append tox

Changelog