I need to make a collection of class-instances sortable. So, I checked the docs, and found a page on how to mimic being a numeric type: http://docs.python.org/ref/numeric-types.html However, it doesn't have anything about comparison operators. How do I do this?

http://python.active-venture.com/ref/customization.html

Overload the below 'rich comparison' operators

__lt__( self, other)


__le__( self, other)


__eq__( self, other)


__ne__( self, other)


__gt__( self, other)


__ge__( self, other)

New in version 2.1. These are the so-called ``rich comparison'' methods, and are called for comparison operators in preference to __cmp__() below. The correspondence between operator symbols and method names is as follows: x<y calls x.__lt__(y), x<=y calls x.__le__(y), x==y calls x.__eq__(y), x!=y and x<>y call x.__ne__(y), x>y calls x.__gt__(y), and x>=y calls x.__ge__(y). These methods can return any value, but if the comparison operator is used in a Boolean context, the return value should be interpretable as a Boolean value, else a TypeError will be raised. By convention, False is used for false and True for true.

Thank you! :)

I can't beleive I missed that!

Quote:Original post by Daniel Miller
Thank you! :)

I can't beleive I missed that!

Actually, they are tricky to find. Make use of the dir() function - dir(object) returns a list of all valid methods for that object, and you can usually find a list of magic functions there.


Example:

IDLE 1.0.3
>>> a = 5
>>> dir(a)
['__abs__', '__add__', '__and__', '__class__', '__cmp__', '__coerce__', '__delattr__', '__div__', '__divmod__', '__doc__', '__float__', '__floordiv__', '__getattribute__', '__getnewargs__', '__hash__', '__hex__', '__init__', '__int__', '__invert__', '__long__', '__lshift__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__neg__', '__new__', '__nonzero__', '__oct__', '__or__', '__pos__', '__pow__', '__radd__', '__rand__', '__rdiv__', '__rdivmod__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rfloordiv__', '__rlshift__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__ror__', '__rpow__', '__rrshift__', '__rshift__', '__rsub__', '__rtruediv__', '__rxor__', '__setattr__', '__str__', '__sub__', '__truediv__', '__xor__']

Quote:Original post by psamty10
IDLE 1.0.3
>>> a = 5
>>> dir(a)
...

dir(int)