Question

Suppose I have a class called Animal and a subclass called Dog. How can I access the Animal’s unicode definition from the Dog class?

 class Animal:
      def __unicode__(self):
           return 'animal'

 class Dog(Animal):
      def __unicode__(self):
           return 'this %s is a dog' % (I want to get the Animal's __unicode__ here)

Answer 1

Since you’re implementing old-style classes in Python 2, you can only access the methods of your base class by their qualified names:

class Animal:
    def __unicode__(self):
        return 'animal'

class Dog(Animal):
    def __unicode__(self):
        return 'this %s is a dog' % Animal.__unicode__(self)

However, if you modify your base class so it becomes a new-style class, then you can use super():

class Animal(object):
    def __unicode__(self):
        return 'animal'

class Dog(Animal):
    def __unicode__(self):
        return 'this %s is a dog' % super(Dog, self).__unicode__()

Note that all classes are new-style classes in Python 3, so super() can always be used when running that version.