Tutorial by Examples

Decorators augment the behavior of other functions or methods. Any function that takes a function as a parameter and returns an augmented function can be used as a decorator. # This simplest decorator does nothing to the function being decorated. Such # minimal decorators can occasionally be used ...

As mentioned in the introduction, a decorator is a function that can be applied to another function to augment its behavior. The syntactic sugar is equivalent to the following: my_func = decorator(my_func). But what if the decorator was instead a class? The syntax would still work, except that now m...

Decorators normally strip function metadata as they aren't the same. This can cause problems when using meta-programming to dynamically access function metadata. Metadata also includes function's docstrings and its name. functools.wraps makes the decorated function look like the original function b...

A decorator takes just one argument: the function to be decorated. There is no way to pass other arguments. But additional arguments are often desired. The trick is then to make a function which takes arbitrary arguments and returns a decorator. Decorator functions def decoratorfactory(message): ...

A singleton is a pattern that restricts the instantiation of a class to one instance/object. Using a decorator, we can define a class as a singleton by forcing the class to either return an existing instance of the class or create a new instance (if it doesn't exist). def singleton(cls): i...

import time def timer(func): def inner(*args, **kwargs): t1 = time.time() f = func(*args, **kwargs) t2 = time.time() print 'Runtime took {0} seconds'.format(t2-t1) return f return inner @timer def example_function(): #do stuff exa...