Python repr and str - the difference
This is usually a question asked in many Python interviews: What is the difference between the __str__ and __repr__ methods of a Python object. The same question was asked by one of my colleagues, which got me researching.
In short __repr__ goal is to be unambigous and __str__ is to be readable.
The official Python documentation
says
1. http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__repr__ __repr__ is used to compute the "official" string representation of an object and
__str__
2. http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#object.__str__ is used to compute the “informal” string representation of an object. The print statement and str() built-in function uses __str__ to display the string representation of the object while the repr() built-in function uses __repr__ to display the object. Using this definition let us take an example to understand what the two methods actually do.
Lets create a datetime object:
>>> import datetime
>>> today = datetime.datetime.now()
When I use the built-in function str() to display today:
>>> str(today)
'2012-03-14 09:21:58.130922'
You can see that the date was displayed as a string in a way that the user can understand the date and time. Now lets see when I use the built-in function repr():
>>> repr(today)
'datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 14, 9, 21, 58, 130922)'
You can see that this also returned a string but the string was the "official" representation of a datetime object. What does official mean? Using the "official" string representation I can reconstruct the object:
>>> eval('datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 14, 9, 21, 58, 130922)')
datetime.datetime(2012, 3, 14, 9, 21, 58, 130922)
The eval() built-in function accepts a string and converts it to a datetime object.
Most functions while trying to get the string representation use the __str__ function, if missing uses __repr__. Thus in a general every class you code must have a __repr__ and if you think it would be useful to have a string version of the object, as in the case of datetime create a __str__ function.
A few references:
