Question

I’m reviewing some old python code and came accross this ‘pattern’ frequently:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, other = None):
        if other:
            self.__dict__ = dict(other.__dict__)

Is this how a copy constructor is typically implemented in Python?

Answer 1

This is a way to copy all attributes from one object to another one. However note that:

• The object passed to the __init__ method may have any type (not the same type as the object being created).
• Only object attributes are copied (class attributes and methods are not).