Question

I have a class, whose __init__ function does a bunch of stuff, and that’s all I need.

So I really just want to call the __init__ function of this class. How can I do this, without assigning it to a variable?

Answer 1

First of all, this is clearly a design error – that code should just be a standalone function.

However, there are a couple of ways that you can do this:

1. Just instantiate as normal – there is no reason you have to assign the result of an expression to a variable. However, this will result in full object construction (and probably destruction shortly thereafter).

   Foo()
   

2. Call the underlying function:

   Foo.__dict__.get('__init__')(None)
   

This won’t trigger object construction, but you probably don’t want that. Note that in the example here, I’ve passed None as the value of self. This only works if __init__ does nothing with self (or, handles the case where it is None).

2a. You could use staticmethod to make this easier:

In [32]: class Foo(object):
   ....:     @staticmethod
   ....:     def __init__():
   ....:         print "Foo init"
   ....:

In [33]: Foo()
Foo init
Out[33]: <django.core.management.commands.shell.Foo at 0x46d49b0>

In [34]: Foo.__init__()
Foo init