Implement packing/unpacking in an object

Question

I have a class that only contains attributes and I would like packing/unpacking to work on it. What collections.abc should I implement to get this behaviour?

Answer 1

Another option would be a named tuple

Item = collections.namedtuple('Item', ['name', 'age', 'gender']) 

So this works out of the box:

a, b, c = Item("Henry", 90, "male")

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If you're on Python 3.7+, you could also take advantage of dataclasses which are more powerful. But you would need to explicitly call astuple:

@dataclasses.dataclass
class Item(object):
    name: str
    age: int
    gender: str

a, b, c = dataclasses.astuple(Item("Henry", 90, "male"))