How to automate the delegation of __special_methods__ in Python?

Question

Let spam be an instance of some class Spam, and suppose that spam.ham is an object of some built-in type, say dict. Even though Spam is not a subclass of dict, I would like its instances to have the same API as a regular dict (i.e. the same methods with the same signatures), but I want to avoid typing out a bazillion boilerplate methods of the form:

    def apimethod(self, this, that):
        return self.ham.apimethod(this, that)

I tried the following:

class Spam(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.ham = dict()

    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        return getattr(self.ham, attr)

...but it works for "regular" methods, like keys and items, but not for special methods, like __setitem__, __getitem__, and __len__:

>>> spam = Spam()
>>> spam.keys()
[]
>>> spam['eggs'] = 42
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'Spam' object does not support item assignment
>>> spam.ham['eggs'] = 42
>>> foo.items()
[('eggs', 42)]
>>> spam['eggs']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'Spam' object is not subscritable
>>> len(spam)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'Spam' object has no len()

All the special methods I tried produced similar errors.

How can I automate the definition of special methods (so that they get referred to the delegate)?

Clarification: I'm not necessarily looking for solutions that leverage the standard method lookup sequence. My goal here is to minimize boilerplate code.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This may not be helpful if you need a solution that prohibits metaclasses as well, but here is the solution I came up with:

def _wrapper(func):
    def _wrapped(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return getattr(self.ham, func)(*args, **kwargs)
    return _wrapped

class DictMeta(type):
    def __new__(cls, name, bases, dct):
        default_attrs = dir(object)
        for attr in dir(dict):
            if attr not in default_attrs:
                dct[attr] = _wrapper(attr)
        return type.__new__(cls, name, bases, dct)

class Spam(object):
    __metaclass__ = DictMeta
    def __init__(self):
        self.ham = dict()

Seems to do what you're looking for:

>>> spam = Spam()
>>> spam['eggs'] = 42
>>> spam.items()
[('eggs', 42)]
>>> len(spam)
1
>>> spam.ham
{'eggs': 42}

If on Python 3.x use class Spam(object, metaclass=DictMeta) and remove the __metaclass__ line from the body of Spam.