Difference between staticmethod and classmethod

Question

What is the difference between a function decorated with @staticmethod and one decorated with @classmethod?

Answer 1

I started learning programming language with C++ and then Java and then Python and so this question bothered me a lot as well, until I understood the simple usage of each.

Class Method: Python unlike Java and C++ doesn't have constructor overloading. And so to achieve this you could use classmethod. Following example will explain this

Let's consider we have a Person class which takes two arguments first_name and last_name and creates the instance of Person.

class Person(object):

    def __init__(self, first_name, last_name):
        self.first_name = first_name
        self.last_name = last_name

Now, if the requirement comes where you need to create a class using a single name only, just a first_name, you can't do something like this in Python.

This will give you an error when you will try to create an object (instance).

class Person(object):

    def __init__(self, first_name, last_name):
        self.first_name = first_name
        self.last_name = last_name

    def __init__(self, first_name):
        self.first_name = first_name

However, you could achieve the same thing using @classmethod as mentioned below

class Person(object):

    def __init__(self, first_name, last_name):
        self.first_name = first_name
        self.last_name = last_name

    @classmethod
    def get_person(cls, first_name):
        return cls(first_name, "")

Static Method: This is rather simple, it's not bound to instance or class and you can simply call that using class name.

So let's say in above example you need a validation that first_name should not exceed 20 characters, you can simply do this.

@staticmethod  
def validate_name(name):
    return len(name) <= 20

and you could simply call using class name

Person.validate_name("Gaurang Shah")