What is a clean, pythonic way to have multiple constructors in Python?

Question

I can\'t find a definitive answer for this. As far as I know, you can\'t have multiple __init__ functions in a Python class. So how do I solve this problem?

Answer 1

All of these answers are excellent if you want to use optional parameters, but another Pythonic possibility is to use a classmethod to generate a factory-style pseudo-constructor:

def __init__(self, num_holes):

  # do stuff with the number

@classmethod
def fromRandom(cls):

  return cls( # some-random-number )