Airton Zanon

Sometime ago I had a need of creating a named constructor in Python, I looked up on some stuff and I did something like this:

class NamedConstructor:
    def __init__(self, name: str, age: int):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age

    def create_person_from_dict(person_data: dict):
        return NamedConstructor(
            name = person_data['name'],
            age = person_data['age']
        )

test = NamedConstructor.create_person_from_dict({'name': 'Airton', 'age': 24})

print(test.name)
## output: Airton

As I'm a noob Pythonist I accepted this solution, because this is pretty much what we do in PHP, as we can't create multiple constructors or multiple methods with same name and different signatures.

Something that I didn't know in the time is that Python has a decorator called @classmethod, this, instead of accepting the argument self - that points to the object instance - on the method, accepts cls that points to the class.

Knowing that, we can rewrite this class as:

class NamedConstructor:
    def __init__(self, name: str, age: int):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age

    @classmethod
    def create_person_from_dict(cls, person_data: dict):
        return cls(
            name = person_data['name'],
            age = person_data['age']
        )

test = NamedConstructor.create_person_from_dict({'name': 'Airton', 'age': 24})

print(test.name)
## output: Airton

There are some other usages for the @classmethod, but used this decorator for it.

If you know some better way for do that or wants to talk more about this, send me a DM on twitter