Determine if a Python class is an Abstract Base Class or Concrete

Question

My Python application contains many abstract classes and implementations. For example:

import abc
import datetime
         


        

Answer 1

Abstract classes and their concrete implementations have an __abstractmethods__ attribute containing the names of abstract methods and properties that have not been implemented. This behaviour is described in PEP 3199:

Implementation: The @abstractmethod decorator sets the function attribute __isabstractmethod__ to the value True. The ABCMeta.__new__ method computes the type attribute __abstractmethods__ as the set of all method names that have an __isabstractmethod__ attribute whose value is true. It does this by combining the __abstractmethods__ attributes of the base classes, adding the names of all methods in the new class dict that have a true __isabstractmethod__ attribute, and removing the names of all methods in the new class dict that don't have a true __isabstractmethod__ attribute. If the resulting __abstractmethods__ set is non-empty, the class is considered abstract, and attempts to instantiate it will raise TypeError. (If this were implemented in CPython, an internal flag Py_TPFLAGS_ABSTRACT could be used to speed up this check.)

So in concrete classes, this attribute either will not exist or will be an empty set. This is easy to check:

def is_abstract(cls):
    if not hasattr(cls, "__abstractmethods__"):
        return False # an ordinary class
    elif len(cls.__abstractmethods__) == 0:
        return False # a concrete implementation of an abstract class
    else:
        return True # an abstract class

Or more succinctly:

def is_abstract(cls):
    return bool(getattr(cls, "__abstractmethods__", False))

print(is_abstract(object))                 # False
print(is_abstract(MessageDisplay))         # True
print(is_abstract(FriendlyMessageDisplay)) # True
print(is_abstract(FriendlyMessagePrinter)) # False