Problems with getattr

Question

I've been tearing my hair out for the past hour trying to figure out a bug in the IRC-enabled program I'm working on, and after some debugging I've found that for some reason, getattr isn't working properly. I have following test code:

def privmsg(self, user, channel, msg):
    #Callback for when the user receives a PRVMSG. 
    prvmsgText = textFormatter(msg,  
    self.factory.mainWindowInstance.ui.testWidget.ui.channelBrowser,
                                QColor(255, 0, 0, 127), 'testFont', 12)
    prvmsgText.formattedTextAppend() 

and everything works perfectly.

Substitute the following, and the code breaks (doesn't output the text to a PyQT TextBrowser instance)

def privmsg(self, user, channel, msg):
    #Callback for when the user receives a PRVMSG. 
    prvmsgText = textFormatter(msg,  
    getattr(self.factory.mainWindowInstance.ui, 'testWidget.ui.channelBrowser'),
                                QColor(255, 0, 0, 127), 'testFont', 12)
    prvmsgText.formattedTextAppend() 

Aren't these two ways of writing the second argument of the textFormatter function essentially equivalent? Why might this happen, and any ideas as to how I might approach a bug like this? Thanks.

Edit: Here is the (brief) textFormatter class, in case it helps:

from timeStamp import timeStamp

class textFormatter(object):
    '''
    Formats text for output to the tab widget text browser.
    '''
    def __init__(self,text,textBrowserInstance,textColor,textFont,textSize):
        self.text = text
        self.textBrowserInstance = textBrowserInstance
        self.textColor = textColor
        self.textFont = textFont
        self.textSize = textSize

    def formattedTextAppend(self):
        timestamp = timeStamp()
        self.textBrowserInstance.setTextColor(self.textColor)
        self.textBrowserInstance.setFontPointSize(self.textSize)
        self.textBrowserInstance.append(unicode(timestamp.stamp()) + unicode(self.text))

Answer 1

No, getattr will get an attribute of an object. It can not traverse the hierarchy you gave in the string. The correct way would be:

getattr(self.factory.mainWindowInstance.ui.testWidget.ui, 'channelBrowser'),
                                QColor(255, 0, 0, 127), 'testFont', 12)

or

getattr(getattr(self.factory.mainWindowInstance.ui.testWidget, 'ui'), 'channelBrowser'),
                                    QColor(255, 0, 0, 127), 'testFont', 12)