[Numpy-discussion] ndarray __getattr__ to perform __getitem__

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

I have an ndarray with named dimensions.  I find myself writing some
fairly laborious code with lots of square brackets and quotes.  It seems
like it wouldn't be such a big deal to overload __getattribute__ so
instead of doing:

r = genfromtxt('results.dat',dtype=[('a','int'), ('b', 'f8'),
('c','int'), ('d', 'a20')])
scatter(r[r['d'] == 'OK']['a'], r[r['d'] == 'OK']['b'])

I could do:

scatter(r[r.d == 'OK'].a, r[r.d == 'OK'].b)

which is really a lot clearer.  Is something like this already possible
somehow?

Is there some reason not to map __getattr__ to __getitem__?

class ndarray():
    ...
    __getattr__ = __getitem__
       
Or something somewhat more sophisticated like:

    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        if self.hasitem(attr):
            return self[attr]
        else:
            raise AttributeError(attr)

TIA for any comments or thoughts on this.

Ian