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Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 08:25:33 -0400
From: Dave Angel <d@davea.name>
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To: boltar2003@boltar.world
Subject: Re: Beginners question
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On 08/30/2012 07:54 AM, boltar2003@boltar.world wrote:
> Hello
>
> I'm slowly teaching myself python so apologies if this is a dumb question.
> but something has confused me with the os.stat() function:
>
>>>> s = os.stat(".")
>>>> print s
> posix.stat_result(st_mode=16877, st_ino=2278764L, st_dev=2053L, st_nlink=2, st_u
> id=1000, st_gid=100, st_size=4096L, st_atime=1346327745, st_mtime=1346327754, st
> _ctime=1346327754)
>
> What sort of object is posix.stat_result? Its not a dictionary or list or a 
> class object as far as I can tell. Thanks for any help.
>

posix.stat_result is a  class, and s is an instance of that class.  You
can see that by typing  type(s).

But you're wondering how print generated all that stuff about the s
instance.  You can start to learn that with dir(s), which shows the
available attributes.  All those attributes that have leading and
trailing double-underscores are called "special attributes," or "special
methods."  In particular notice __str__(), which is  a method provided
for your convenience.  print will call that if it's available, when you
try to print an instance.    It also masquerades as a tuple using
__getitem__() and other special methods.

Normal use of the instance is done by the attributes like   s.st_atime 
and s.st_size, or by using the object as a tuple.  (using the square
brackets to fetch individual items or a range of items)

You can get more documentation directly from s by simply typing  
help(s)  and/or  help(os.stat)

Or you can go to the web docs, http://docs.python.org/library/os.html  
and search downward for os.stat  (this link is currently for Python 2.7.3)

-- 

DaveA