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Creating the Dog Class (Trial)
00:00 Let’s try it out. Press F5 to run the file, and it puts me into the interactive mode over here, which has the information of this file of the class that I defined.
00:11 This is specific to IDLE, so if you are using a different editor, then just make sure to print it down here in the file before you run it here. I get the chance to play with it a bit, so I can create a dog.
00:24
I’ll call the dog "Philo", and it’s 12 years old. This is what I get returned. I get a Dog object. Now I should be able to print(), well, I should assign it to something, right?
00:41
So I assigned the Dog instance to the variable philo, and then I should be able to print(philo). So this is going to call .__str__(), and you see the f-string returned: Philo, the name of the dog is 12 years old, so that’s a nice representation.
00:58
The other task was that I should be able to call .speak() on it and pass it a sound. "Wau".
01:07
There it is, my string Philo says Wau. This is just a re-creation of the Dog class that you built in the Python Basics: Object-Oriented Programming Course.
01:17 And this is what we’re going to start with with the next review exercise, but it’s always a good review exercise also to redo some code that you’ve already built before, because if you start from scratch, there’s always going to be a little bit of thinking involved.
01:31 If you ended up with something that looks like this, then great job. This is the code that I’m going to continue working with in the next exercise as well.
Martin Breuss RP Team on Feb. 16, 2026
Thanks, that’s a nice idea, and I agree it’s a good way to reinforce that .species is a class attribute accessible via both Dog.species and self.species.
For this particular lesson I kept .__str__() focused on the instance data so that the output stays simple and readable.
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Reinhard Neuwirth on Jan. 31, 2026
What I would add to the
dunder __str__method is:return f"{self.name} is a member of the species {Dog.species} and is {self.age} years old.", and alternativelyf"...{self.species}..."just to highlight the point that the class attributespeciesis accessible both as a class attribute and as well as from all instantiations.