Alias a struct using it's own field

General Usage
1

let’s say I have the following struct:

struct Dog
    name
    age
end

then I wanted to create an array of dogs like the following:

array = [Dog(:Jack, 2), Dog(:Max, 3)]

2-element Vector{Dog}:
 Dog(:Jack, 2)
 Dog(:Max, 3)

is it possible to alias a struct with it’s field; in this case, the field “name” so that I would get something like this:

2-element Vector{Dog}:
 :Jack
 :Max
2

I don’t know what you mean by “alias” in this context, I presume you are not referring to accessing the name field like this:

julia> struct Dog
           name
           age
       end

julia> array = [Dog(:Jack, 2), Dog(:Max, 3)]
2-element Vector{Dog}:
 Dog(:Jack, 2)
 Dog(:Max, 3)

julia> getfield.(array, :name)
2-element Vector{Symbol}:
 :Jack
 :Max

?

1 Like
3

If what you mean by “alias” is to customize the way Dog instances are printed, then you can define a new, specific method for Base.show. This is explained in mode details in the Custom pretty-printing section of the manual

julia> struct Dog
           name
           age
       end

julia> array = [Dog(:Jack, 2), Dog(:Max, 3)]
2-element Vector{Dog}:
 Dog(:Jack, 2)
 Dog(:Max, 3)

julia> function Base.show(io::IO, mime::MIME"text/plain", dog::Dog)
           show(io, mime, dog.name)
       end

julia> array
2-element Vector{Dog}:
 :Jack
 :Max
4 Likes
4

If I am going to create an array of structs with say 5, 10 fields, it would look ugly. That’s why I wanted to represent each struct with the field name.

5

thanks, that’s what I was looking for!