8.7: Operator Overloading
- Page ID
- 17099
By defining other special methods, you can specify the behavior of operators on user-defined types. For example, if you define a method named __add__
for the Time
class, you can use the +
operator on Time objects.
Here is what the definition might look like:
# inside class Time: def __add__(self, other): seconds = self.time_to_int() + other.time_to_int() return int_to_time(seconds)
And here is how you could use it:
>>> start = Time(9, 45) >>> duration = Time(1, 35) >>> print start + duration 11:20:00
When you apply the +
operator to Time objects, Python invokes __add__
. When you print the result, Python invokes __str__
. So there is quite a lot happening behind the scenes!
Changing the behavior of an operator so that it works with user-defined types is called operator overloading. For every operator in Python there is a corresponding special method, like __add__
. For more details, see http://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#specialnames.
Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)
Write an add
method for the Point class.