Python, creating objects

Question

I\'m trying to learn python and I now I am trying to get the hang of classes and how to manipulate them with instances.

I can\'t seem to understand this practice pro

Answer 1

Objects are instances of classes. Classes are just the blueprints for objects. So given your class definition -

# Note the added (object) - this is the preferred way of creating new classes
class Student(object):
    name = "Unknown name"
    age = 0
    major = "Unknown major"

You can create a make_student function by explicitly assigning the attributes to a new instance of Student -

def make_student(name, age, major):
    student = Student()
    student.name = name
    student.age = age
    student.major = major
    return student

But it probably makes more sense to do this in a constructor (__init__) -

class Student(object):
    def __init__(self, name="Unknown name", age=0, major="Unknown major"):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age
        self.major = major

The constructor is called when you use Student(). It will take the arguments defined in the __init__ method. The constructor signature would now essentially be Student(name, age, major).

If you use that, then a make_student function is trivial (and superfluous) -

def make_student(name, age, major):
    return Student(name, age, major)

For fun, here is an example of how to create a make_student function without defining a class. Please do not try this at home.

def make_student(name, age, major):
    return type('Student', (object,),
                {'name': name, 'age': age, 'major': major})()