Question

When I attempt to use a static method from within the body of the class, and define the static method using the built-in staticmethod function as a decorator, like this:

class Klass(object):

    @staticmethod  # use as decorator
    def _stat_func():
        return 42

    _ANS = _stat_func()  # call the staticmethod

    def method(self):
        ret = Klass._stat_func() + Klass._ANS
        return ret

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "call_staticmethod.py", line 1, in <module>
    class Klass(object): 
  File "call_staticmethod.py", line 7, in Klass
    _ANS = _stat_func() 
  TypeError: 'staticmethod' object is not callable

I understand why this is happening (descriptor binding), and can work around it by manually converting _stat_func() into a staticmethod after its last use, like so:

class Klass(object):

    def _stat_func():
        return 42

    _ANS = _stat_func()  # use the non-staticmethod version

    _stat_func = staticmethod(_stat_func)  # convert function to a static method

    def method(self):
        ret = Klass._stat_func() + Klass._ANS
        return ret

So my question is:

    Are there cleaner or more "Pythonic" ways to accomplish this?

Answer 1

update for python version >= 3.10: staticmethod functions can be called from within class scope just fine (for more info see: python issue tracker, or "what’s new", or here)

---

for python version <= 3.9 continue reading

staticmethod objects apparently have a __func__ attribute storing the original raw function (makes sense that they had to). So this will work:

class Klass(object):

    @staticmethod  # use as decorator
    def stat_func():
        return 42

    _ANS = stat_func.__func__()  # call the staticmethod

    def method(self):
        ret = Klass.stat_func()
        return ret

---

As an aside, though I suspected that a staticmethod object had some sort of attribute storing the original function, I had no idea of the specifics. In the spirit of teaching someone to fish rather than giving them a fish, this is what I did to investigate and find that out (a C&P from my Python session):

>>> class Foo(object):
...     @staticmethod
...     def foo():
...         return 3
...     global z
...     z = foo

>>> z
<staticmethod object at 0x0000000002E40558>
>>> Foo.foo
<function foo at 0x0000000002E3CBA8>
>>> dir(z)
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__format__', '__func__', '__get__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__']
>>> z.__func__
<function foo at 0x0000000002E3CBA8>

Similar sorts of digging in an interactive session (dir is very helpful) can often solve these sorts of question very quickly.