Question

When a static method is called, is there any way for it to know which subclass it was invoked from?

(I’m aware that this is very un-OO and probably never useful in a well written program, but I’d like to know if the language provides it)

For example:

class A(object):
  @staticmethod
  def foo():
    print 'bar'
    # *** I would like to print either 'A' or 'B' here

class B(A):
  pass

A.foo()
B.foo()

Answer 1

You have to use a @classmethod instead of a @staticmethod for this. With a class method, you get a reference to the class passed in as first argument:

class A(object):
  @classmethod
  def foo(cls):
    print cls.__name__
    # *** I would like to print either 'A' or 'B' here

class B(A):
  pass

A.foo()
B.foo()

Output: http://codepad.org/bW3E51r9

A
B