I would like to give a daughter class some extra attributes without having to explicitly call a new method. So is there a way of giving the inherited class an __init__
type method which does not override the __init__
method of the parent class?
I have written the code below purely to illustrate my question (hence the poor naming of attributes etc).
class initialclass():
def __init__(self):
self.attr1 = 'one'
self.attr2 = 'two'
class inheritedclass(initialclass):
def __new__(self):
self.attr3 = 'three'
def somemethod(self):
print 'the method'
a = inheritedclass()
for each in a.__dict__:
print each
#I would like the output to be:
attr1
attr2
attr3
Thank you
As far as I know that's not possible, however you can call the init method of the superclass, like this:
class inheritedclass(initialclass):
def __init__(self):
initialclass.__init__(self)
self.attr3 = 'three'
Just call the parent's __init__
using super
:
class inheritedclass(initialclass):
def __new__(self):
self.attr3 = 'three'
super(initialclass, self).__init__()
I strongly advise to follow Python's naming conventions and start a class with a Capital letter, e.g. InheritedClass
and InitialClass
. This helps quickly distinguish classes from methods and variables.
First of all you're mixing __init__
and __new__
, they are different things. __new__
doesn't take instance (self
) as argument, it takes class (cls
).
As for the main part of your question, what you have to do is use super
to invoke superclass' __init__
.
Your code should look like this:
class initialclass(object):
def __init__(self):
self.attr1 = 'one'
self.attr2 = 'two'
class inheritedclass(initialclass):
def __init__(self):
self.attr3 = 'three'
super(inheritedclass, self).__init__()
It's incredibly simple. Define a new __init__
method and call the parent's __init__
at the beginning.
# assuming a class Base, its __init__ takes one parameter x
class Derived(Base):
def __init__(self, x, y):
# whatever initialization is needed so we can say Derived is-a Base
super(Derived, self).__init__(x)
# now, add whatever makes Derived special - do your own initialization
self.y = y
In Python 3, you don't have to (and therefore propably shouldn't, for simplicity) explicitly inherit from object
or pass the class and self
to super
.
Just call a designated method from the parent's init, if it exists:
class initialclass():
def __init__(self):
self.attr1 = 'one'
self.attr2 = 'two'
if hasattr(self, 'init_subclass'):
self.init_subclass()
class inheritedclass(initialclass):
def init_subclass(self):
self.attr3 = 'three'