Magic Methods Help

You use a "Magic Method" to take-over what happens when a built in function is applied to your object.

For instance in the video, he uses the str() on his Thief object "Kenneth", but when he uses str(Kenneth) it only prints out a string representation of the object pointer in memory (<thieves.Thief object at 0x........>) and what he really wants str() to do is print out the name associated with that instance of the class which you can do my using str in your class.

Here's a code example, you can see that my classes str method hijacks what python does when str() is applied to my num_five int variable vs my num_five object variable.

class pointless:
    def __init__(self):
        pass

    def __str__(self):
        return "This is a string representation of the number 5"

# prints 5 as a string
num_five = 5
print(str(num_five))

# prints "This is a string representation of the number 5"
num_five = pointless()
print(str(num_five))