method chaining in python

Question

(not to be confused with itertools.chain)

I was reading the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_chaining

My question is: what is the best

Answer 1

I was looking for something similar for chaining Class functions and found no good answer, so here is what I did and thought was a very simple way of chaining: Simply return the self object.

So here is my setup:

Class Car():
    def __init__(self, name=None):
        self.name = name
        self.mode = 'init'

    def set_name(self, name):
        self.name = name
        return self

    def drive(self):
        self.mode = 'drive'
        return self

And now I can name the car and put it in drive state by calling:

my_car = Car()
my_car.set_name('Porche').drive()

Caveat: This only works on the class functions that do not intend to return any data.

Hope this helps!