Here’s a trick I learned today from Chris that’s worth sharing: creating “virtual” attributes for objects (in need for a better wording).

Here’s a use-case: we have a person with a Name and a Surname — how could we access its full name in one string like person.full_name? You could do that with Python’s @property decorator:

class Person(object):
 
    def __init__(self, name, surname):
        self.name = name
        self.surname = surname
 
    @property
    def full_name(self):
        return "%s %s" % (self.name, self.surname)
 
p=Person('John', 'Doe')
print (p.name, p.surname)
('John', 'Doe')
 
print p.full_name
John Doe

Without the decorator we would need to access the string as person.full_name(), instead of the simpler and more intuitive person.full_name. Pretty neat.