In django, why does defining __unicode__ method on some types of objects (models, etc.) result in print(obj) printing the output of __unicode__ but if I create my own classes, and define __unicode__, it doesn't seem to get called? I've read about __repr__, but it seems like all the focus in Django is on __unicode__.
What is the relationship between the two, and what is the best practice to get good string representations of my objects in my logs?
The Django Model class defines __str__ for you with something like this:
def __str__(self):
return unicode(self).encode('utf-8')
Therefore, when you print(obj) (and obj is a Model), Python calls obj.__str__() which calls unicode(obj) which calls obj.__unicode__().
If you create your own class and add a definition of __str__ like the one above, then you can use __unicode__ to return a unicode representation of your object, and have that one function also control the object's str representation.
