How to call same method for a list of objects?

Question

Suppose code like this:

class Base:
    def start(self):
        pass
    def stop(self)
        pass

class A(Base):
    def start(self):
        ... do something for A
    def stop(self)
        .... do something for A

class B(Base):
    def start(self):

    def stop(self):

a1 = A(); a2 = A()
b1 = B(); b2 = B()

all = [a1, b1, b2, a2,.....]

Now I want to call methods start and stop (maybe also others) for each object in the list all. Is there any elegant way for doing this except of writing a bunch of functions like

def start_all(all):
    for item in all:
        item.start()

def stop_all(all):

Answer 1

maybe map, but since you don't want to make a list, you can write your own...

def call_for_all(f, seq):
    for i in seq:
        f(i)

then you can do:

call_for_all(lamda x: x.start(), all)
call_for_all(lamda x: x.stop(), all)

by the way, all is a built in function, don't overwrite it ;-)

Answer 2

The *_all() functions are so simple that for a few methods I'd just write the functions. If you have lots of identical functions, you can write a generic function:

def apply_on_all(seq, method, *args, **kwargs):
    for obj in seq:
         getattr(obj, method)(*args, **kwargs)

Or create a function factory:

def create_all_applier(method, doc=None):
    def on_all(seq, *args, **kwargs):
        for obj in seq:
            getattr(obj, method)(*args, **kwargs)
    on_all.__doc__ = doc
    return on_all

start_all = create_all_applier('start', "Start all instances")
stop_all = create_all_applier('stop', "Stop all instances")
...

Answer 3

The approach

for item in all:
    item.start()

is simple, easy, readable, and concise. This is the main approach Python provides for this operation. You can certainly encapsulate it in a function if that helps something. Defining a special function for this for general use is likely to be less clear than just writing out the for loop.

Answer 4

Taking @Ants Aasmas answer one step further, you can create a wrapper that takes any method call and forwards it to all elements of a given list:

class AllOf:
    def __init__(self, elements):
        self.elements = elements
    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        def on_all(*args, **kwargs):
            for obj in self.elements:
                getattr(obj, attr)(*args, **kwargs)
        return on_all

That class can then be used like this:

class Foo:
    def __init__(self, val="quux!"):
        self.val = val
    def foo(self):
        print "foo: " + self.val

a = [ Foo("foo"), Foo("bar"), Foo()]
AllOf(a).foo()

Which produces the following output:

foo: foo
foo: bar
foo: quux!

With some work and ingenuity it could probably be enhanced to handle attributes as well (returning a list of attribute values).