Overriding special methods on an instance

Question

I hope someone can answer this that has a good deep understanding of Python :)

Consider the following code:

>>> class A(object):
...     pas         


        

Answer 1

The reason for this is special methods (__x__()) are defined for the class, not the instance.

This makes sense when you think about __new__() - it would be impossible to call this on an instance as the instance doesn't exist when it's called.

So you can do this on the class as a whole if you want to:

>>> A.__repr__ = __repr__
>>> a
A

Or on an individual instance, as in kindall's answer. (Note there is a lot of similarity here, but I thought my examples added enough to post this as well).