Overloading Operators in Python

Suppose you have created a Vector class to represent two-dimensional vectors, what happens when you use the plus operator to add them? Most likely Python will yell at you.

You could, however, define the __add__ method in your class to perform vector addition and then the plus operator would behave as per expectation −

Example

#!/usr/bin/python
class Vector:
   def __init__(self, a, b):
      self.a = a
      self.b = b
   def __str__(self):
      return 'Vector (%d, %d)' % (self.a, self.b)
   def __add__(self,other):
      return Vector(self.a + other.a, self.b + other.b)
v1 = Vector(2,10)
v2 = Vector(5,-2)
print v1 + v2

Output

When the above code is executed, it produces the following result −

Vector(7,8)