Elegant ways to support equivalence ("equality") in Python classes

You need to be careful with inheritance:

>>> class Foo:
    def __eq__(self, other):
        if isinstance(other, self.__class__):
            return self.__dict__ == other.__dict__
        else:
            return False

>>> class Bar(Foo):pass

>>> b = Bar()
>>> f = Foo()
>>> f == b
True
>>> b == f
False

Check types more strictly, like this:

def __eq__(self, other):
    if type(other) is type(self):
        return self.__dict__ == other.__dict__
    return False

Besides that, your approach will work fine, that's what special methods are there for.

The way you describe is the way I've always done it. Since it's totally generic, you can always break that functionality out into a mixin class and inherit it in classes where you want that functionality.

class CommonEqualityMixin(object):

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return (isinstance(other, self.__class__)
            and self.__dict__ == other.__dict__)

    def __ne__(self, other):
        return not self.__eq__(other)

class Foo(CommonEqualityMixin):

    def __init__(self, item):
        self.item = item

You don't have to override both __eq__ and __ne__ you can override only __cmp__ but this will make an implication on the result of ==, !==, < , > and so on.

is tests for object identity. This means a is b will be True in the case when a and b both hold the reference to the same object. In python you always hold a reference to an object in a variable not the actual object, so essentially for a is b to be true the objects in them should be located in the same memory location. How and most importantly why would you go about overriding this behaviour?

Edit: I didn't know __cmp__ was removed from python 3 so avoid it.

I think that the two terms you're looking for are equality (==) and identity (is). For example:

>>> a = [1,2,3]
>>> b = [1,2,3]
>>> a == b
True       <-- a and b have values which are equal
>>> a is b
False      <-- a and b are not the same list object

The 'is' test will test for identity using the builtin 'id()' function which essentially returns the memory address of the object and therefore isn't overloadable.

However in the case of testing the equality of a class you probably want to be a little bit more strict about your tests and only compare the data attributes in your class:

import types

class ComparesNicely(object):

    def __eq__(self, other):
        for key, value in self.__dict__.iteritems():
            if (isinstance(value, types.FunctionType) or 
                    key.startswith("__")):
                continue

            if key not in other.__dict__:
                return False

            if other.__dict__[key] != value:
                return False

         return True

This code will only compare non function data members of your class as well as skipping anything private which is generally what you want. In the case of Plain Old Python Objects I have a base class which implements __init__, __str__, __repr__ and __eq__ so my POPO objects don't carry the burden of all that extra (and in most cases identical) logic.

Instead of using subclassing/mixins, I like to use a generic class decorator

def comparable(cls):
    """ Class decorator providing generic comparison functionality """

    def __eq__(self, other):
        return isinstance(other, self.__class__) and self.__dict__ == other.__dict__

    def __ne__(self, other):
        return not self.__eq__(other)

    cls.__eq__ = __eq__
    cls.__ne__ = __ne__
    return cls

Usage:

@comparable
class Number(object):
    def __init__(self, x):
        self.x = x

a = Number(1)
b = Number(1)
assert a == b

This incorporates the comments on Algorias' answer, and compares objects by a single attribute because I don't care about the whole dict. hasattr(other, "id") must be true, but I know it is because I set it in the constructor.

def __eq__(self, other):
    if other is self:
        return True

    if type(other) is not type(self):
        # delegate to superclass
        return NotImplemented

    return other.id == self.id

I wrote a custom base with a default implementation of __ne__ that simply negates __eq__:

class HasEq(object):
  """
  Mixin that provides a default implementation of ``object.__neq__`` using the subclass's implementation of ``object.__eq__``.

  This overcomes Python's deficiency of ``==`` and ``!=`` not being symmetric when overloading comparison operators
  (i.e. ``not x == y`` *does not* imply that ``x != y``), so whenever you implement
  `object.__eq__ <https://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#object.__eq__>`_, it is expected that you
  also implement `object.__ne__ <https://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#object.__ne__>`_

  NOTE: in Python 3+ this is no longer necessary (see https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__ne__)
  """

  def __ne__(self, other):
    """
    Default implementation of ``object.__ne__(self, other)``, delegating to ``self.__eq__(self, other)``.

    When overriding ``object.__eq__`` in Python, one should also override ``object.__ne__`` to ensure that
    ``not x == y`` is the same as ``x != y``
    (see `object.__eq__ <https://docs.python.org/2/reference/datamodel.html#object.__eq__>`_ spec)

    :return: ``NotImplemented`` if ``self.__eq__(other)`` returns ``NotImplemented``, otherwise ``not self.__eq__(other)``
    """
    equal = self.__eq__(other)
    # the above result could be either True, False, or NotImplemented
    if equal is NotImplemented:
      return NotImplemented
    return not equal

If you inherit from this base class, you only have to implement __eq__ and the base.

In retrospect, a better approach might have been to implement it as a decorator instead. Something like @functools.total_ordering