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Understanding Class and Instance Attributes
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In this short lesson, you’re going to be understanding class and instance attributes and what the difference is between them. Take a look at this code. Got a class here, Doggo, and you’ve got something that looks like a variable declaration here, where it says species = "Canis familiaris". And this isn’t in any method, so it’s not in the .__init__() method, the constructor. It’s at the, say, root level of the class indentation here, at the class level.
00:28 Then within the constructor method, you have some more attributes, which will become insurance attributes. What you have here are class attributes and instance attributes.
00:40 The class attribute is outside any method, whereas the instance attributes are within the constructor.
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Take a look at this other example. You’ve got a class, Point. It has a class attribute of dimensions = 2, so all points will have two dimensions, at least in this model.
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You could have a point in three dimensions or even four dimensions, but here you’re going to specify that their dimensions are 2, and you want all instances to have two dimensions, or at least the ones that are derived from this class or that are instantiated from this class.
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Then within the constructor method, you have two instance attributes that will only live on the instances of the Point. To summarize that, an instance attribute’s value is specific to a particular instance.
01:33 So if you instantiate two different objects and give them different attribute values, they will be unique to each instance, and they won’t be accessible from each instance. A class attribute, on the other hand, is available from both the class itself and all instances derived from that class.
01:53 So even if you’re dealing with an instance or if you don’t have any instances, you’re still able to access a class attribute.
Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Jan. 2, 2024
@Shiva You’re on the right track! Both attributes and variables are places where you can store a value. However, the difference lies within the context in which they’re used.
Broadly speaking, a variable is used to represent a storage location paired with an associated symbolic name or identifier, which contains some quantity of information referred to as a value. As such, a variable is a more general term.
On the other hand, an attribute is a special kind of variable that’s associated with an object, such as a particular instance of the Doggo class. For example, the .name of a dog is its attribute, which you can think of as a variable. However, a global variable defined outside of the class is not an attribute.
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Shiva on Dec. 30, 2023
Great Stuff, but how attributes are different from variables in python?I’m looking at a response from bing ai which says “a class attribute is a type of variable in Python” does that mean attributes are also variables? can you please clarify a bit. Thanks in advance.