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Star Unpacking For Own Classes

I was wondering if it's possible to use star unpacking with own classes rather than just builtins like list and tuple. class Agent(object): def __init__(self, cards): s

Solution 1:

The exception message:

argument after * must be a sequence

should really say, argument after * must be an iterable.

Often star-unpacking is called "iterable unpacking" for this reason. See PEP 448 (Additional Unpacking Generalizations) and PEP 3132 (Extended Iterable Unpacking).

Edit: Looks like this has been fixed for python 3.5.2 and 3.6. In future it will say:

argument after * must be an iterable


In order to have star unpack, your class must be an iterable i.e. it must define an __iter__ that returns an iterator:

class Agent(object):
    def __init__(self, cards):
        self.cards = cards
    def __len__(self):
        return len(self.cards)
    def __iter__(self):
        return (card for card in self.cards)

then:

In [11]: a = Agent([1, 2, 3, 4])

In [12]: print(*a)  # Note: in python 2 this will print the tuple
1 2 3 4

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