Vertical bar in Python bitwise assignment operator

Question

There is a code and in class\' method there is a line:

object.attribute |= variable

I can\'t understand what it means. I didn\'t find (|=)

Answer 1

For an integer this would correspond to Python's "bitwise or" method. So in the below example we take the bitwise or of 4 and 1 to get 5 (or in binary 100 | 001 = 101):

Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> a = 4
    >>> bin(a)
    '0b100'
    >>> a |= 1
    >>> bin(a)
    '0b101'
    >>> a
    5

More generalised (as Alejandro says) is to call an object's or method, which can be defined for a class in the form:

def __or__(self, other):
    # your logic here
    pass

So in the specific case of an integer, we are calling the or method which resolves to a bitwise or, as defined by Python.