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

Why do you think your solution is "clunky"? Personally I would prefer one constructor with default values over multiple overloaded constructors in situations like yours (Python does not support method overloading anyway):

def __init__(self, num_holes=None):
    if num_holes is None:
        # Construct a gouda
    else:
        # custom cheese
    # common initialization

For really complex cases with lots of different constructors, it might be cleaner to use different factory functions instead:

@classmethod
def create_gouda(cls):
    c = Cheese()
    # ...
    return c

@classmethod
def create_cheddar(cls):
    # ...

In your cheese example you might want to use a Gouda subclass of Cheese though...