Outputting Specific Prosperities of an Array(List) of Objects in Python

March 3, 2022

I have an class Student which has an array(list) of Objects called Students. I am trying to output the names of all the students in the array.

class Student(object):
    name = ""
    age = 0
    major = ""

    # The class "constructor" - It's actually an initializer 
    def __init__(self, name, age, major):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age
        self.major = major

Students = []

Students.append(Student("Dave",23,"Chem"))
Students.append(Student("Emma",34,"Maths"))
Students.append(Student("Alex",19,"Art"))

print(Students[0].__dict__)
print(Students[1].__dict__)
print (Students[0])

Both the ways I have found and tired do not output the specific name but the location or the whole object. Is there a way to just output the name? For example output Students[0] name Dave

{'name': 'Emma', 'age': 34, 'major': 'Maths'}
<__main__.Student object at 0x000001FCDE4C2FD0>```

>Solution :

If you just want the name, you can print(Students[0].name). If you want to see the relevant attributes when printing a Student object, you can implement the __repr__ method.

class Student:

    # The class "constructor" - It's actually an initializer 
    def __init__(self, name, age, major):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age
        self.major = major

    def __repr__(self):
        return f"<Student name={self.name} age={self.age} major={self.major}>"

This way you can simply do print(Students[0]) to see the name, age and major of a student.

By the way, for a normal class definition, you want to initialize instance attributes inside the __init__ method, instead of declaring them above __init__: those are class attributes. Please read this section of the documentation to familiarize yourself with the syntax.