Pythonic way to avoid a mountain of if...else statements?

Question

This has come up several times recently and I'd like to deal with it better than I have been: I have a series of attributes that I'm cross referencing between an object and a dictionary. If the value is different between them, I want to set the object.attribute to the dictionary['attribute'] value. I also want to keep track of what's getting changed.

Now, my first thought is to just use an if else statement for every attribute, but after writing a few of these it's apparent that I'm re-writing the same code again and again. There has to be a DRY way to do this, where I specify only the parts that are changing every time, and then loop through all the attributes.

In production code, there are 15 different attributes, but my example below will just use 2 for simplicity. I have some idea about how to do this in a clever way, but I'm missing the final step of actually setting the object.attribute equal to the dictionary['attribute'] value.

# Simulated data setup - not under my control IRL
class someClass:
    def __init__(self, name, version):
        self.name = name
        self.version = version

objA = someClass('Test1','1.1')        
dictA = {'name':'Test1','revision':'1.2'}

# My code below        

# option 1 - a series of for loops
def updateAttributesSimple(obj, adict, msg):
    if obj.name == adict['name']:
        msg.append('Name is the same')
    else:
        msg.append('Name was updated from %s to %s' % (obj.name, adict['name']))
        obj.name = adict['name']

    if obj.version == adict['revision']:
        msg.append('Version is the same')
    else:
        msg.append('Version was updated from %s to %s' % (obj.version, adict['revision']))
        obj.version = adict['revision']        

# option 2 - trying to be clever about this
def updateAttributesClever(obj, adict, msg):
    attributeList = (('Name', obj.name, adict['name']),
                     ('Version', obj.version, adict['revision']))

    for valTuple in attributeList:
        if valTuple[1] == valTuple[2]:
            msg.append('%s is the same' % (valTuple[0]))
        else:
            msg.append('%s was updated from %s to %s' % (valTuple[0], valTuple[1], valTuple[2]))
            # code to set valTuple[1] = valTuple[2] goes here, but what is it?
            # valTuple[1] = valTuple[2] attempts to set the desired value to a string, rather than the attribute of obj itself            


msg = ['Updating Attributes simple way:']
updateAttributesSimple(objA, dictA, msg)
print '\n\t'.join(msg)

#reset data
objA = someClass('Test1','1.1')        
dictA = {'name':'Test1','revision':'1.2'}

msg = ['Updating Attributes clever way:']
updateAttributesClever(objB, dictB, msg)
print '\n\t'.join(msg)

The idea being that this way, whenever I need to add another attribute, I can just update the list of attributes being inspected and the rest of the code is already written. What's the Pythonic way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

setattr() is what you're looking for:

attributeList = (('Name',    'name',    'name'),
                 ('Version', 'version', 'revision'))

for title, obj_attribute, dict_key in attributeList:
    obj_value = getattr(obj, obj_attribute)
    adict_value = adict[dict_key]

    if obj_value == adict_value:
        msg.append('%s is the same' % (obj_value))
    else:
        msg.append('%s was updated from %s to %s' % (title, obj_value, adict_value))

        setattr(obj, obj_attribute, adict_value)

Answer 2

This should work for your:

class X(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.a = 1
        self.b = 2

x = X()

d = dict()
d['a'] = 1
d['b'] = 3

def updateAttributes(obj,dic):
    def update(name):
        val = dic[name]
        if getattr(obj,name)==val:
            print name,"was equal"
        else:
            print "setting %s to %s" % (name,val)
            setattr(obj,name,val)

    for name in ['a','b']:
        update(name)

updateAttributes(x,d)
print x.a
print x.b