Question

Is it possible to get the name of a subclass? For example:

class Foo:
    def bar(self):
        print type(self)

class SubFoo(Foo):
    pass

SubFoo().bar()

will print: < type 'instance' >

I’m looking for a way to get "SubFoo".

I know you can do isinstance, but I don’t know the name of the class a priori, so that doesn’t work for me.

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/python
class Foo(object):
  def bar(self):
    print type(self)

class SubFoo(Foo):
  pass

SubFoo().bar()

Subclassing from object gives you new-style classes (which are not so new any more – python 2.2!) Anytime you want to work with the self attribute a lot you will get a lot more for your buck if you subclass from object. Python’s docs … new style classes. Historically Python left the old-style way Foo() for backward compatibility. But, this was a long time ago. There is not much reason anymore not to subclass from object.