On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 3:41 AM, Xavier Ho <cont...@xavierho.com> wrote: > On 31 May 2010 20:19, Payal <payal-pyt...@scriptkitchen.com> wrote: <snip> >> When I type help(something) e.g. help(list), I see many methods like, >> __methodname__(). Are these something special? > > They're very special. You can think of them as "Python internal functions", > and are called internally by other functions. > >> >> How do I use them and why >> put "__" around them? > > You call them as if they were any other function. 99% of the time though, > you don't need to call them, as there are better, cleaner ways.
To be a bit more specific, double-underscore methods are called internally by Python to implement various operators. For example, `a + b` is usually equivalent to `a.__add__(b)`, and `len(a)` calls `a.__len__()` internally. For more info, see http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#special-method-names Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
