Calling a different method inside of another method

Question

Somewhat new to Python but this is a question about writing functions without repeating oneself.

Using openpyxl I've created a document class and a workbook (wb) with 3 sheets inside:

self.sheet1 = self.wb['sheet1']
self.sheet2 = self.wb['sheet2']
self.sheet3 = self.wb['sheet3']

I also have a function in this class that looks through rows of sheet3 for particular text.

def find_text_row_number(self, text):
    text_row_number = set([])

    for row in self.sheet3.iter_rows(self.sheet3.min_row,self.sheet3.max_row):
        for cell in row:
            if cell.value == text:
                text_row_number.add(cell.row)

    return sorted(text_row_number)

My question is: How can I call this function elsewhere in the program and have it search sheet2, instead of sheet3? Have tried looking into decorators and also using a default value (sheet=self.sheet3), but this raises an error because self has not yet been defined.

Is there maybe a more efficient way to write this particular function? Or some aspect of Python I'm missing that could help out here?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 10 '20 at 20:23

Try:

def find_text_row_number(self, text, sheet_name='sheet1'):
    text_row_number = set([])
    sheet = getattr(self, sheet_name)

    for row in sheet.iter_rows(sheet.min_row, sheet.max_row):
        for cell in row:
            if cell.value == text:
                text_row_number.add(cell.row)

    return sorted(text_row_number)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '20 at 20:16

Don't use separate variables, put all the sheets in a list. Then you can access the one you want with an index.

The first code would initialize the list:

self.sheets = [self.wb['sheet1'], self.wb['sheet2'], self.wb['sheet3']]

Then your other method can take an optional index.

def find_text_row_number(self, text, sheet_num = 3):
    sheet = self.sheets[sheet_num-1]
    text_row_number = set([])

    for row in sheet.iter_rows(sheet.min_row,sheet.max_row):
        for cell in row:
            if cell.value == text:
                text_row_number.add(cell.row)

    return sorted(text_row_number)

When you want to process sheet2, use

x.find_text_row_number("text", sheet_num = 2)

Calling a different method inside of another method

2 Answers2