Is there a cleaner way to use a 2 dimensional array?

Question

I\'m trying to make a 2D array class, and ran into a problem. The best way I could figure out to do it was to pass get/setitem a tuple of the indices, and have it unpacked i

Answer 1

There are a couple ways you can do this. If you want syntax like test[1][2], then you can have __getitem__ returns a column (or row), which can be indexed again with __getitem__ (or even just return a list).

However, if you want the syntax test[1,2], you are on the right track, test[1,2] actually passes the tuple (1,2) to the __getitem__ function, so you don't need to include the parantheses when calling it.

You can make the __getitem__ and __setitem__ implementations a little less messy like so:

def __getitem__(self, indices):
    i, j = indices
    return (self.data[i], self.data[j])

with your actual implementation of __getitem__ of course. The point being that you have split the indices tuple into appropriately named variables.