Question

Whenever I’m defining a class which has a number of parameters I often find myself doing something like this

class myClass(object):
    def __init__(self,param1,param2,param3, ...):
         self.param1 = param1
         self.param2 = param2
         self.param3 = param3
 ...

My question is: is there a smarter, Pythonier way of doing this?

Thanks,
Alex.

Answer 1

You could accept a variable number of named arguments and automatically set them, like this:

class MyClass(object):
    def __init__(self, **kwargs): # variable named arguments
        for k, v in kwargs.items():
           setattr(self, k, v) # set the value of self.k to v, same as self.k = v


test = MyClass(param1="param1", param2="param2")
print test.param1 # "param1"

setattr documentation