Why can't I use the method __cmp__ in Python 3 as for Python 2?
You need to provide the rich comparison methods for ordering in Python 3, which are __lt__
, __gt__
, __le__
, __ge__
, __eq__
, and __ne__
. See also: PEP 207 -- Rich Comparisons.
__cmp__
is no longer used.
More specifically, __lt__
takes self
and other
as arguments, and needs to return whether self
is less than other
. For example:
class Point(object): ... def __lt__(self, other): return ((self.x < other.x) and (self.y < other.y))
(This isn't a sensible comparison implementation, but it's hard to tell what you were going for.)
So if you have the following situation:
p1 = Point(1, 2)p2 = Point(3, 4)p1 < p2
This will be equivalent to:
p1.__lt__(p2)
which would return True
.
__eq__
would return True
if the points are equal and False
otherwise. The other methods work analogously.
If you use the functools.total_ordering
decorator, you only need to implement e.g. the __lt__
and __eq__
methods:
from functools import total_ordering@total_orderingclass Point(object): def __lt__(self, other): ... def __eq__(self, other): ...
This was a major and deliberate change in Python 3. See here for more details.
- The ordering comparison operators (
<
,<=
,>=
,>
) raise aTypeError
exception when the operands don’t have a meaningful natural ordering. Thus, expressions like1 < ''
,0 > None
orlen <= len
are no longer valid, and e.g.None < None
raisesTypeError
instead of returningFalse
. A corollary is that sorting a heterogeneous list no longer makes sense – all the elements must be comparable to each other. Note that this does not apply to the==
and!=
operators: objects of different incomparable types always compare unequal to each other.builtin.sorted()
andlist.sort()
no longer accept thecmp
argument providing a comparison function. Use thekey
argument instead. N.B. thekey
andreverse
arguments are now “keyword-only”.- The
cmp()
function should be treated as gone, and the__cmp__()
special method is no longer supported. Use__lt__()
for sorting,__eq__()
with__hash__()
, and other rich comparisons as needed. (If you really need thecmp()
functionality, you could use the expression(a > b) - (a < b)
as the equivalent forcmp(a, b)
.)
In Python3 the six rich comparison operators
__lt__(self, other) __le__(self, other) __eq__(self, other) __ne__(self, other) __gt__(self, other) __ge__(self, other)
must be provided individually. This can be abbreviated by using functools.total_ordering
.
This however turns out rather unreadable and unpractical most of the time. Still you have to put similar code pieces in 2 funcs - or use a further helper func.
So mostly I prefer to use the mixin class PY3__cmp__
shown below. This reestablishes the single __cmp__
method framework, which was and is quite clear and practical in most cases. One can still override selected rich comparisons.
Your example would just become:
class point(PY3__cmp__): ... # unchanged code
The PY3__cmp__ mixin class:
PY3 = sys.version_info[0] >= 3if PY3: def cmp(a, b): return (a > b) - (a < b) # mixin class for Python3 supporting __cmp__ class PY3__cmp__: def __eq__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) == 0 def __ne__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) != 0 def __gt__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) > 0 def __lt__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) < 0 def __ge__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) >= 0 def __le__(self, other): return self.__cmp__(other) <= 0else: class PY3__cmp__: pass