How to make a chain of function decorators

Question

How can I make two decorators in Python that would do the following?

@makebold
@makeitalic
def say():
   return "Hello"

...which should return:

"<b><i>Hello</i></b>"

I'm not trying to make HTML this way in a real application - just trying to understand how decorators and decorator chaining works.

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

Python decorators add extra functionality to another function

An italics decorator could be like

def makeitalic(fn):
    def newFunc():
        return "<i>" + fn() + "</i>"
    return newFunc

Note that a function is defined inside a function. What it basically does is replace a function with the newly defined one. For example, I have this class

class foo:
    def bar(self):
        print "hi"
    def foobar(self):
        print "hi again"

Now say, I want both functions to print "---" after and before they are done. I could add a print "---" before and after each print statement. But because I don't like repeating myself, I will make a decorator

def addDashes(fn): # notice it takes a function as an argument
    def newFunction(self): # define a new function
        print "---"
        fn(self) # call the original function
        print "---"
    return newFunction
    # Return the newly defined function - it will "replace" the original

So now I can change my class to

class foo:
    @addDashes
    def bar(self):
        print "hi"

    @addDashes
    def foobar(self):
        print "hi again"

Hope this works!!