Question

I have a class with many methods. How can I modify my methods so that they can also be accessed directly as a function without creating object of that class? Is it possible.

Answer 1

The methods will be “unbound” (meaning, essentially, that they have no self to work with). If the functions do not operate upon self, you can turn them into static-methods (which do not take a self first argument) and then assign them to variables to be used like functions.

Like so:

class MyClass(object):
    @staticmethod
    def myfunc():
        return "It works!"

myfunc = MyClass.myfunc

myfunc() # prints "It works!"

Essentially, you need to ask yourself “What data does my method need to (er) function?” Depending on your answer, you can use @staticmethod or @classmethod or you may find that you do in fact need a self in which case you will need to create an object before trying to use its methods.

That final case would look something like:

myobj = MyClass()
del MyClass # This is a singleton class
myfunc = myobj.myfunc

All of that aside, if you find that all of your methods are actually staticmethods, then it’s better style to refactor them out of the class into plain-old functions, which they really are already. You may have learned this “class as namespace” style from Java, but that isn’t correct in Python. Python namespaces are represented by modules.