CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonobject
henrebotha
henrebotha

Reputation: 1298

Python: is there a use case for changing an instance's class?

Related: Python object conversion

I recently learned that Python allows you to change an instance's class like so:

class Robe:
    pass

class Dress:
    pass

r = Robe()
r.__class__ = Dress

I'm trying to figure out whether there is a case where 'transmuting' an object like this can be useful. I've messed around with this in IDLE, and one thing I've noticed is that assigning a different class doesn't call the new class's __init__ method, though this can be done explicitly if needed.

Virtually every use case I can think of would be better served by composition, but I'm a coding newb so what do I know. ;)

Upvotes: 5

Views: 200

Answers (2)

liori
liori

Reputation: 42367

I remember using this technique ages ago to “upgrade” existing objects after recognizing what kind of data they hold. It was a part of an experimental XMPP client. XMPP uses many short XML messages (“stanzas”) for communication.

When the application received a stanza, it was parsed into a DOM tree. Then the application needed to recognize what kind of stanza it is (a presence stanza, message, automated query etc.). If, for example, it was recognized as a message stanza, the DOM object was “upgraded” to a subclass that provided methods like “get_author”, “get_body” etc.

I could of course just make a new class to represent a parsed message, make new object of that class and copy the relevant data from the original XML DOM object. There were two benefits of changing object's class in-place, though. Firstly, XMPP is a very extensible standard, and it was useful to still have an easy access to the original DOM object in case some other part of the code found something useful there, or while debugging. Secondly, profiling the code told me that creating a new object and explicitly copying data is much slower than just reusing the object that would be quickly destroyed anyway—the difference was enough to matter in XMPP, which uses many short messages.

I don't think any of these reasons justifies the use of this technique in production code, unless maybe you really need the (not that big) speedup in CPython. It's just a hack which I found useful to make code a bit shorter and faster in the experimental application. Note also that this technique will easily break JIT engines in non-CPython implementations, making the code much slower!

Upvotes: 2

Blckknght
Blckknght

Reputation: 104792

There is rarely a good reason to do this for unrelated classes, like Robe and Dress in your example. Without a bit of work, it's hard to ensure that the object you get in the end is in a sane state.

However, it can be useful when inheriting from a base class, if you want to use a non-standard factory function or constructor to build the base object. Here's an example:

class Base(object):
    pass

def base_factory():
    return Base()  # in real code, this would probably be something opaque

def Derived(Base):
    def __new__(cls):
        self = base_factory()     # get an instance of Base
        self.__class__ = Derived  # and turn it into an instance of Derived
        return self

In this example, the Derived class's __new__ method wants to construct its object using the base_factory method which returns an instance of the Base class. Often this sort of factory is in a library somewhere, and you can't know for certain how it's making the object (you can't just call Base() or super(Derived, cls).__new__(cls) yourself to get the same result).

The instance's __class__ attribute is rewritten so that the result of calling Derived.__new__ will be an instance of the Derived class, which ensures that it will have the Derived.__init__ method called on it (if such a method exists).

Upvotes: 6

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