Question

I’m writing a class that makes use of some functions inside its __init__ function and I’m not sure about the best practice of where to define those functions. I usually like to define __init__ first but if I need to use the a function/method within the __init__ then it needs to be defined first. I dont want to define it outside the class as its useless outside the class but it seems messy to me to define methods before the __init__. What are the normal conventions for this?

Answer 1

Just add the methods to your class like every other method

class Test(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.hi()

    def hi(self):
        print "Hi!"

No problem at all.

While it is not mentioned in the Python Style Guide IIRC, it’s convention to let __init__ be the first method in your class.