__NEW__ AND __INIT__ IN OLD-STYLE VERSUS NEW-STYLE CLASSES
The purpose of this article is to discuss around __new__ and __init__ methods from Python. The __new__ and __init__ methods behave differently between themselves and between the old-style versus new-style python class definitions.
Understanding the difference between __new__ and __init__
The major difference between these two methods is that __new__ handles object creation and __init__ handles object initialization. During instantiation these two have slight differences in how they work, when defined differently.
A bit about classes in python
Classes in python are classified as new-style and old-style. Old-style classes are the ones that are prior to python 3 and defined without inheriting from base class 'object', which in turn is inherited from 'type' by default. Old-style class in python 2.x :
class A: # -> inherits from 'type'passNew-style class in python 2.x:
class A(object): # -> clearly inherits from 'object'passIn python 3 there aren't new or old styles of classes and they inherit directly from 'object' so there is no need to specify it as a base anymore.
The object base class brings methods/properties that are common to all new-style classes. Throughout the rest of the article we will examine the __new__ and __init__ methods in both cases to determine how they behave and how we can use them.
Treating different cases
Before diving into the actual implementations you need to know that __new__ accepts cls as it's first parameter and __init__ accepts self, because when calling __new__ you actually don't have an instance yet, therefore no self exists at that moment, whereas __init__ is called after __new__ and the instance is in place, so you can use self with it.
__new__ and __init__ for old style classes
Old-style classes don't actually have a __new__ method because for them __init__ is the constructor, so basically if we would have:
class A: def __new__(cls): print "A.__new__ is called" # -> this is never called
A()the body of __new__ will never be executed in this case because it is not the purpose for old-style classes. If we were to override __init__ instead:
class A:def __init__(self): print "A.__init__ called"
A()the output would be:
A.__init__ called
Now let's try returning something from __init__:
class A:def __init__(self): return 29
A()this would yield:
TypeError: __init__() should return Noneso that means we can't actually control what to return when instantiating the old-style class.
__new__ and __init__ for new style classes
The new-style classes let the developer override both __new__ and __init__ and they have distinct purposes, __new__ (the constructor) is solely for creating the object and __init__ (the initializer) for initializing it. Let's see the order of their execution:
class A(object): # -> don't forget the object specified as basedef __new__(cls): print "A.__new__ called" return super(A, cls).__new__(cls) def __init__(self): print "A.__init__ called"
A()the output will be:
A.__new__ called
A.__init__ calledYou may be wondering from where is __init__ or __new__ called and what I have for you is that __new__ is called automatically when calling the class name (when instantiating), whereas __init__ is called every time an instance of the class is returned by __new__ passing the returned instance to __init__ as the 'self' parameter, therefore even if you were to save the instance somewhere globally/statically and return it every time from __new__, then __init__ will be called every time you do just that. Knowing this it means that if we were to ommit calling super for __new__ then __init__ won't be executed. Let's see if that's the case:
class A(object):def __new__(cls):print "A.__new__ called"def __init__(self):print "A.__init__ called" # -> is actually never calledprint A()whose output is:
A.__new__ called
NoneObviously the instantiation is evaluated to None since we don't return anything from the constructor. Wondering what might happen if we were to return something from __new__?
class A(object):def __new__(cls):print "A.__new__ called"return 29print A()guess what the output is:
A.__new__ called
29Let's see what happens when we try to return from __init__:
class A(object):def __init__(self):print "A.__init__ called"return 33 # -> TypeError: __init__ should return None
A()which yields:
TypeError: __init__ should return NoneThis is mainly because the handler that calls __init__ raises the TypeError exception and it wouldn't even make sense to return anything from __init__ since it's purpose is just to alter the fresh state of the newly created instance.
It seems the new-style classes have much to offer in terms of flexibility, allowing us to do any PRE/POST operations at both creation and initialization levels and leaves us control over what we return at instantiation time. Considering that, let's try and return an instance of a different class. First we define our alternative class:
class Sample(object):def __str__(self):return "SAMPLE"And then we define our __new__ overriding class:
class A(object):def __new__(cls):return Sample()which could also be written as:
class A(object): def __new__(cls): return super(A, cls).__new__(Sample)and then call:
print A()that would output:
SAMPLE