Essential Books

Make custom classes orderable

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min, max, and sorted all need the objects to be orderable. To be properly orderable, the class needs to define all of the 6 methods __lt__, __gt__, __ge__, __le__, __ne__ and __eq__: 

class IntegerContainer(object):
    def __init__(self, value):
        self.value = value
        
    def __repr__(self):
        return "{}({})".format(self.__class__.__name__, self.value)
    
    def __lt__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test less than {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value < other.value
    
    def __le__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test less than or equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value <= other.value

    def __gt__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test greater than {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value > other.value

    def __ge__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test greater than or equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value >= other.value

    def __eq__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value == other.value

    def __ne__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test not equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value != other.value

Though implementing all these methods would seem unnecessary, omitting some of them will make your code prone to bugs.

Examples: 

alist = [IntegerContainer(5), IntegerContainer(3),
         IntegerContainer(10), IntegerContainer(7)
        ]

res = max(alist)
# Out: IntegerContainer(3) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(10) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(7) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(10)
print(res)
# Out: IntegerContainer(10)

res = min(alist)   
# Out: IntegerContainer(3) - Test less than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(10) - Test less than IntegerContainer(3)
#      IntegerContainer(7) - Test less than IntegerContainer(3)
print(res)
# Out: IntegerContainer(3)

res = sorted(alist)
# Out: IntegerContainer(3) - Test less than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(10) - Test less than IntegerContainer(3)
#      IntegerContainer(10) - Test less than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(7) - Test less than IntegerContainer(5)
#      IntegerContainer(7) - Test less than IntegerContainer(10)
print(res)
# Out: [IntegerContainer(3), IntegerContainer(5), IntegerContainer(7), IntegerContainer(10)]

sorted with reverse=True also uses __lt__: 

res = sorted(alist, reverse=True)
# Out: IntegerContainer(10) - Test less than IntegerContainer(7)
#      IntegerContainer(3) - Test less than IntegerContainer(10)
#      IntegerContainer(3) - Test less than IntegerContainer(10)
#      IntegerContainer(3) - Test less than IntegerContainer(7)
#      IntegerContainer(5) - Test less than IntegerContainer(7)
#      IntegerContainer(5) - Test less than IntegerContainer(3)
print(res)
# Out: [IntegerContainer(10), IntegerContainer(7), IntegerContainer(5), IntegerContainer(3)]

But sorted can use __gt__ instead if the default is not implemented: 

del IntegerContainer.__lt__   # The IntegerContainer no longer implements "less than"

res = min(alist) 
# Out: IntegerContainer(5) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(3)
#      IntegerContainer(3) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(10)
#      IntegerContainer(3) - Test greater than IntegerContainer(7)
print(res)
# Out: IntegerContainer(3)

Sorting methods will raise a TypeError if neither __lt__ nor __gt__ are implemented: 

del IntegerContainer.__gt__   # The IntegerContainer no longer implements "greater then"

res = min(alist)
TypeError: unorderable types: IntegerContainer() < IntegerContainer()

functools.total_ordering decorator can be used simplifying the effort of writing these rich comparison methods. If you decorate your class with total_ordering, you need to implement __eq__, __ne__ and only one of the __lt__, __le__, __ge__ or __gt__, and the decorator will fill in the rest: 

import functools

@functools.total_ordering
class IntegerContainer(object):
    def __init__(self, value):
        self.value = value
        
    def __repr__(self):
        return "{}({})".format(self.__class__.__name__, self.value)
    
    def __lt__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test less than {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value < other.value
    
    def __eq__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value == other.value
    
    def __ne__(self, other):
        print('{!r} - Test not equal to {!r}'.format(self, other))
        return self.value != other.value
IntegerContainer(5) > IntegerContainer(6)
# Output: IntegerContainer(5) - Test less than IntegerContainer(6)
# Returns: False

IntegerContainer(6) > IntegerContainer(5)
# Output: IntegerContainer(6) - Test less than IntegerContainer(5)
# Output: IntegerContainer(6) - Test equal to IntegerContainer(5)
# Returns True

Notice how the \> (greater than) now ends up calling the less than method, and in some cases even the __eq__ method. This also means that if speed is of great importance, you should implement each rich comparison method yourself.

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Sorting Minimum and Maximium:
* Make custom classes orderable
* Special case dictionaries
* Using the key argument
* Default Argument to max min
* Getting a sorted sequence
* Extracting N largest or N smallest items from an iterable
* Minimum and Maximum of a sequence
* Getting the minimum or maximum of several values
Table Of Contents
0 Getting Started
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2 Filter
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4 Functions
5 Decorators
6 Math module
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11 Sorting Minimum and Maximium
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68 pip PyPI Package Manager
69 locale module
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72 deque module
73 Distributing self-contained applications
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76 Debugging
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79 PyInstaller - Distributing Python Code
80 Iterables and Iterators
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83 args and kwargs
84 functools module
85 Garbage Collection
86 Indentation
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88 Pickle data serialization
89 urllib
90 Binary Data
91 Python and Excel
92 Idioms
93 Method Overriding
94 Difference between a module and a package
95 Data Serialization
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97 RabbitMQ using AMQPStorm
98 PostgreSQL
99 Descriptor
100 Common Pitfalls
101 Multiprocessing
102 Creating temporary files with tempfile
103 Working with ZIP files
104 Stack
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107 Working around Global Interpreter Lock
108 Deployment using conda
109 Logging
110 Processes and Threads
111 os module
112 Comments and documentation
113 Database Access
114 Python HTTP Server
115 Alternatives to switch statement from other languages
116 List destructuring
117 Accessing Python source code and bytecode
118 Mixins
119 Attribute Access
120 ArcPy
121 Python Anti-Patterns
122 Plugin and Extension Classes
123 Websockets
124 Immutable data types
125 String representations of class
126 Arrays
127 Operator Precedence
128 Polymorphism
129 Alternative Python implementations
130 List Comprehensions
131 Web Server Gateway Intrerface WSGI
132 2to3 tool
133 Abstract Syntax Tree
134 Abstract Base Classes
135 Unicode
136 ssh in Python
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138 Neo4j
139 Performance optimization
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142 pass statement
143 Testing with py.test
144 Date Formatting
145 heapq
146 tkinter
147 CLI subcommands
148 Defining functions with list arguments
149 SQLite3 module
150 Persistence with pickle
151 Connecting to SQL Server
152 Design Patterns
153 Multidimensional arrays
154 Audio
155 pyglet
156 queue module
157 ijson
158 webbrowser module
159 base64 module
160 Flask
161 Groupby
162 Sockets and Message Encryption / Decryption
163 pygame
164 Input Subset and Output External Data Files using Pandas
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
168 Creating a Windows Service
169 Mutable vs. Immutable
170 configparser
171 Common Exceptions
172 Optical Character Recognition OCR
173 Python Data Types
174 Partial functions
175 Generating graphs
176 Unzipping Files
177 Functional Programming
178 Python Virtual Environment - virtualenv
179 sys module
180 virtual environment with virtualenvwrapper
181 virtualenvwrapper on Windows
182 Python Requests Post
183 Plotting with Matplotlib
184 Python Lex-Yacc
185 pyaudio
186 shelve
187 pip and PyPI Package Manager
188 Writing to CSV from String or List
189 Raise Custom Errors Exceptions
190 Using loops within functions
191 Contributors