What is the Python object() Method?

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Python Object()

Welcome folks! for today in this tutorial, we are going to be discussing the Python object() method and class.

So let us get started with the basic definition and syntax of the Python object() method.

The Python object() Method

The Python object() method, when called, returns a new featureless object of the object class. This method requires no arguments. The syntax for using the object() method is given below.

obj = object()

Here, obj is now a featureless object which holds the built-in properties and methods which are the default for all classes.

Typically, the Python object class serves as the base class for all classes including user-defined ones. Hence all classes inherit from the Object class in Python. This is the default case for Python 3.x versions. But for Python 2.x versions for defining a new-style class, one needs to explicitly make the class inherit from the object class as shown below.

class my_class(object):
     ...

Python object() Method – Sample Program

Now that we have gathered a fair knowledge about the object class and object() method let us jump into an example to get a clearer picture.

#object() object
obj = object()

print("obj = ", obj)
print("Type of obj = ", type(obj))
print(dir(obj)) #attributes of obj

Output:

obj =  <object object at 0x01374040>
Type of obj =  <class 'object'>
['__class__', '__delattr__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__']

Simply here we have created a new object obj using the object() method and determine its type as well as all of its attributes using type() and dir() methods respectively.

From the above output, we can clearly see that obj belongs to the object class. Note, obj does not have a __dict__ attribute. Hence, we can’t assign arbitrary attributes to an instance of the object class.

Properties of the Python object() Method

In this section we are going to look at some of the object properties, explore it’s uses and try to play around with it.

class demo():
    a = 10
    b = 20

#declaring object of user-defined class
d1 = demo()

#featureless objects
d2 = object() 
d3 = object()

print("d2 == d3? ", d2 == d3)
print("issubclass(demo, object)? ", issubclass(demo, object)) #demo inherites from object class
print("isinstance(d1, object)? ", isinstance(d1, object))
print("Type of d2 = ", type(d2))
print(d2)

Output:

Object Output
Output

In the code above, demo is a user-defined class with some values a and b. d1 is an object from the demo class. Whereas, d2 and d3 are empty objects from the object class created using the object() method.

It is clear from the above output that even d2 and d3 are two empty objects of the same type, d2==d3 condition is not satisfied. Again using both the issubclass() and isinstance() methods over demo class and d1 object respectively, we can infer the following statements.

  1. the demo class is a subclass of the object class hence inherits from it,
  2. And, d1(demo object) is also an instance of the object class(base class).

You can also see that we cannot directly print an empty object, so we get <object object at 0x007C4040>.

Summing Up

That’s it for this topic. For more information we highly recomend going through the links below in the reference seection.

For any further questions related to this topic, feel free to use the comments below.

Happy learning.

References