Methods

A Method to the Madness

For now let us focus on how to extend our new class with a bit of functionality. To do so we will define something that reminds us of functions. In the context of OOP this is called a method. Usually, a method needs to refer to a particular object which it operates on. In Python this object is passed in as the first parameter, called self. This parameter will be filled in automatically by Python if you call the method via the .-operator, hence you do not need to to pass self into the method even though it is part of the list of parameters in the method signature. Let’s take a look at another example:

class Sample:

    # !!! Mind the indentation !!!
    def print_me(self):
        print("I am", self, "of type", type(self))


# Create some new Sample instances
my_sample = Sample()
my_other_sample = Sample()

print("--- Printing my_sample ---")
my_sample.print_me()
# Note that Python fills in the "self" automatically
# In the above line, "self" will be the "my_sample"-object

print("--- Printing my_other_sample ---")
my_other_sample.print_me()
# Here, "self" will be "my_other_sample"

The output of print_me() is not very nice or helpful at all. If you want to pretty-print an object you will have to implement a special method called __str__(). More on that later…

Construction Work

It would be really nice if we could set the instance attributes directly when creating an instance, wouldn’t it? A special method, called a constructor, can help us with that:

# Declare to python that there is a new class
class Sample:

    # Tell python how to construct an object of that class
    def __init__(self, identifier, collector):
        self.identifier = identifier
        self.collector = collector


# Let's try that out
some_sample = Sample(identifier="0123", collector="Darwin")  # ← Constructor call

# You still can use the .-operator to access attributes and methods
print(some_sample.identifier)

# Hey we can also have multiple samples in a list
samples = [
    Sample(identifier="0123", collector="Darwin"),
    Sample(identifier="0124", collector="Mendel"),
    Sample(identifier="0120a", collector="Darwin"),
    Sample(identifier="0120b", collector="Irwin"),
]

# Who collected the first sample again?
print(samples[0].collector)

Fine Print

Now we have the most essential components to build ourselves a first useful version of a Sample class.

class Sample:

    # This is the constructor
    def __init__(self, identifier, collector):
        self.identifier = identifier
        self.collector = collector

    # This will help us with printing the instances in a nice fashion
    def __str__(self):
        return "Sample: " + self.identifier + ", collected by " + self.collector


# Lets try that out
sample = Sample(identifier="0123", collector="Darwin")

# This is possible since we implemented the __str__-method
print(sample)

Rules for __str__:

• The method signature is __str__(self).
• It must return a string.
• The method will be called by print(…) to figure out how to display an object on the command line.

Do Task 2 and Task 3 now