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"))

Answer 2

You can unpack any Iterable. This means you need to implement the __iter__ method, and return an iterator. In your case, this could simply be:

def __iter__(self):
    return iter((self.name, self.age, self.gender))

Alternatively you could make your class an Iterator, then __iter__ would return self and you'd need to implement __next__; this is more work, and probably not worth the effort.

For more information see What exactly are Python's iterator, iterable, and iteration protocols?

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Per the question I linked above, you could also implement an iterable with __getitem__:

def __getitem__(self, index):
    return (self.name, self.age, self.gender)[index]