What is the difference between __str__ and __repr__?

In this article you will learn the difference between __str__ and __repr__ in Python – find out in which situation you use each operator!

What’s up programmer, ok? Let’s learn more about Python’s __str__ and __repr__ statements!

Basically __str__ serves to display an object to the end user

__repr__ is used to display an object to code developers

Check out this example:

import datetime

today = datetime.datetime.now()

print(str(today)) # 2020-07-08 13:16:04.162076
print(repr(today)) # datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 8, 13, 16, 4, 162076)

As you can see the outputs are different, each one matters in a specific way to the reader.

The first one, with str, is readable by the clients, while the one with repr is not

But most classes have no differentiation in the final result, so be careful

See an example:

class Person:
 def __init__(self, name, age):
  self.name = name
  self.age = age

joao = Person("João", 30)

print(str(joao)) # <__main__.Pessoa object at 0x7f7c8903d4c0>

print(repr(joao)) # <__main__.Pessoa object at 0x7f7c8903d4c0>

In this case it would have no effect to show the str to the end client

We can assume that the __str__ function will provide the most human-readable form of an object possible.

__repr__ is commonly used by developers to debug the application, where they can receive more information about an object at the prompt.

Conclusion

In this article we learned the difference between __str__ and __repr__

The str function serves to display the results of a class to end clients

With repr, we can get other data from a class, which are not useful to users of the system.

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