We know that we can use + operator for adding numbers and at the same time to concatenate strings. This is possible because + operator is overloaded by both int class and str class. The operators are basically methods defined in respective classes. Defining methods for operators is known as operator overloading. For e.g. To use + operator with custom objects we need to define a method called __add__ .
Example
Following code make it easy to understand how operator overloading works
import math class Circle: def __init__(self, radius): self.__radius = radius def setRadius(self, radius): self.__radius = radius def getRadius(self): return self.__radius def area(self): return math.pi * self.__radius ** 2 def __add__(self, another_circle): return Circle( self.__radius + another_circle.__radius ) c1 = Circle(3) print(c1.getRadius()) c2 = Circle(6) print(c2.getRadius()) c3 = c1 + c2 # This is because we have overloaded + operator by adding a method __add__ print(c3.getRadius())
Output
This gives the output
3 6 9
Modifying the behavior of an operator so that it works with user-defined types is called operator overloading. For every operator in Python there is a corresponding special method, like __add__. For more details, see docs.python.org/ref/specialnames.html.