Decorators 101 Recap and Review

Great overview of decorators!

Great tutorials!! One question, though– After reading the cheat sheet, I found myself not understanding

1. the difference between the following two examples
2. the use case of example 2

Could anyone here help me understand this better? Thanks!

Example 1

import functools

def name(arg_1, ...):
    def decorator_name(func):
        @functools.wraps(func)
        def wrapper_name(*args, **kwargs):
            value = func(*args, **kwargs)
            return value
        return wrapper_name
    return decorator_name

Example2

import functools

def name(_func=None, *, arg_1=val_1, ...):
    def decorator_name(func):
        @functools.wraps(func)
        def wrapper_name(*args, **kwargs):
            value = func(*args, **kwargs)
            return value
        return wrapper_name

    if _func is None:
        return decorator_name
    else:
        return decorator_name(_func)

Hi,

the difference is how the decorators are used. The first example decorator must be called with arguments (or at least parentheses):

@name(val1, ...)
def func(...):
    ...

The second example defines a decorator that can be used both with and without arguments:

@name
def func(...):
    ...

@name(arg1=val1, ...):
def func(...):
    ...

There are more details about this in the original article: realpython.com/primer-on-python-decorators/#both-please-but-never-mind-the-bread

Hopefully this makes it a little clearer?

The video version of this tutorial was much better for me than the written one, which to me just seemed like an exercise to go through. I found the real world examples almost riveting and have them safely saved away!

Very helpful tutorial. Thanks!

These video materials are so better than the written articles. keep up the good work guys.

Great tutorial!! Thanks!

Awesome tutorial

Excellent Tutorial and good examples

Good real world example. Thanks

Great tutorial, mate

I like how the tutorial gets to the essence of the topic.

Excellent ! Nuff said.

Lots of material was covered here. Very useful. Thanks!

Nice lesson and examples. Looking forward to coming up with creative decorator ideas. I’ll most likely be using the timing and debug decorators in the near future.

A great intro to decorators

Thought this was the best explanation of decorators I have seen. I still struggle for how to use them. I would think it would be most useful how to enable and disable the re-definition of a function they basically perform. THat is when debugging - your function would be wrapped to be debugged or timed for example. Then when ready to release the code disable the decorations. Not sure - short of editing the code - how that is done.

Great course, Chris, thanks!

Really liked this class. It was a slow and methodical exposition on a difficult topic. I’ll probably review the class a few more times for it all to sink in. Thanks Chris!!!

Finally understood the concept of decorators. Thank you for this course.

I know that this is not just specific to this lesson but I think it would ad some experience that after completing the whole lesson you would get some image in RealPython style and would be send to your profile section devoted to your completed lessons :) Would be better than finishing and nothing happens. ;)

Still.. very good lesson. Thank You :)

@stefhx: Great to hear you enjoyed the course :) When you complete a course (== all lessons in the course) you’ll automatically receive a completion certificate.

You can access your completion certificates in your list of completed courses but maybe I can make that a bit more visible and easier to find. Thanks for the heads up!

Thank you for this masterpiece! There is so much to understand and learn.

It’s super great tutorial. Just one question though what does this !r do in the f-strings? Maybe I missed it on a certain video.

Hi Sammy-Boy.

The !r format specifier means that repr() should be used instead of the default str() when converting the variable.

For string variables it will in practice add single quotes around the string.

Very informative course; thanks!

Great tutorial, thanks! Time to think about how to apply it to my current projects :-)

This is a very in depth and well explained view of decorators. This course has been fleshed out well and examples and use cases are relavent thus making it very simple for begginers to grasp their heads around.

My only reccomedation is to make sure some of the more obscure items are always explained a litle bit more in depth e.g. repr or !r.

Thanks

I’m struggling a little bit in a code that make heavy usage of decorators. The course helped me to understand a little bit more about decorators… but still have tons of doubts.

Wonderful summary, easy to grasp, thank you very much Christopher and Real Python team.

Thank You!

Just to better understand. Decorators are basically something referred to as “wrapper functions”. It works as function itself, where a pre-definded function is input as an argument. The object of this wrapper function is to use the inputed function as is without altering its original code, with the additional advantage of imbedding new code before or after and ultimately returning the aggregated output.

Incredible course - very well thought out and designed. The best RealPython course I’ve done so far (and I’ve done quite a lot!)

The best thing about this course is how much groundwork the teacher laid first, to avoid blowing our brains up when explaining decorators, a topic which most people find quite hard to grasp.

The design of this course shows a huge amount of thought about which aspects of decorators are the sticking point for most newbies, and how convey understanding about the precursor elements that make decorators easier to understand.

I was pleasantly surprised at how relevant and useful the examples were. I liked that the text-entry screen caps are sped up so that we’re not sitting there watching someone type slowly.

Fantastic work, RP team!