I have gone through most of the documentation of __getitem__ in the Python docs, but I am still unable to grasp the meaning of it.

So all I can understand is that __getitem__ is used to implement calls like self[key]. But what is the use of it?

Lets say I have a python class defined in this way:

class Person:
    def __init__(self,name,age):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age

    def __getitem__(self,key):
        print ("Inside `__getitem__` method!")
        return getattr(self,key)

p = Person("Subhayan",32)
print (p["age"])

This returns the results as expected. But why use __getitem__ in the first place? I have also heard that Python calls __getitem__ internally. But why does it do it?

Can someone please explain this in more detail?

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