# Python classes: basics beyond the absolute basics¶

In this article, I will discuss a couple of things about Python’s classes assuming you know what the following does:

class Point():

def __init__(self, point):
self.point = point


To refresh, we define a class Point which we will use to represent the co-ordinates of a point in space. We can create an instance of this class representing a point as follows:

p1 = Point((1,2,3))


There are two things which you must note:

• I assume that that the point is in a three dimensional space
• You describe the point as a tuple (no particular reason)

And you can define methods to do stuff with these points (such as finding the euclidean distance between two points, and such), etc. You know all of that. Let’s start with the things you may not know.

Note

I am using a Python 3 interactive session. The final program will however work on both Python 2 and Python 3.

## Informative representation of your point¶

Let’s get back to creating the representation of a point using the above class: p1=Point((1,2,3)). Let’s see what print(p1) gives us:

>>> print(p1)
<__main__.Point object at 0x7fb123e67dd0>


So it tells us that p1 is a Point object and few other things which you can ignore. This is exactly what is, an object of Point class, but to Python. What is it to you or your program’s user? It is a point in space. Can we tell the user something more useful? We sure can. We will have to define a special method, __str__() in our class. This is how it will look after adding the method to class Point:

class Point():

def __init__(self, point):
self.point = point

def __str__(self):
return 'Point: {0}'.format(str(self.point))


The __str__() method above returns a string consisting of a string representing the point (str(self.point)) and a word saying that it’s a point. You may include any other helpful information you may find relevant here. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that the return value should be a string. Let’s try printing a point object now:

>>> print(p1)
Point: (1, 2, 3)


Much better isn’t it? Now your program’s user will have no problem in understanding what p1 is and also makes it easy for you to display points in your program’s output.

## Definining custom operators¶

One of the basic things that you may want to do when you are working with points in space is find what is usually known as the euclidean distance. To refresh, for two points, p1 and p2 having co-ordinates (x1,y1,z1) and (x2,y2,z2), the distance is calculated as follows (in Python speak) math.sqrt((x1-x2)**2 + (y1-y2)**2 + (z1-z2)**2) (where math.sqrt is the square root function defined in the math module). For our Point class, you could define a method to do this. But, how about being able to do something like print(p1-p2) to print the distance between the two? This also plays well with our intuition of distance in 1 dimension (How far is 5 from 2? 5-2 = 3). Let’s try doing that with our current code:

>>> p1=Point((1,2,3))
>>> p2=Point((1,2,3))
>>> print(p1-p2)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'Point' and 'Point'

Of course, Python doesn’t have any idea what you want it do when you ask it to subtract p2 from p1. However, we can tell Python what to do by adding a new method, __sub__(). After adding this method, the class looks like this:

import math

class Point():

def __init__(self, point):
self.point = point

def __str__(self):
return 'Point: {0}'.format(str(self.point))

def __sub__(self, other):
s=0
for x1,x2 in zip(self.point, other.point):
s = s + (x1-x2)**2

return math.sqrt(s)


The _sub__ method basically calculates the euclidean distance and returns it. The speciality of this method is that when you ask Python to subtract something from an object of Point class, it calls this method and the return value of this method is returned as the result of the subtraction operation. If you are curious as to which is self and which is other in __sub__() when you ask Python to evaluate: p1-p2, self refers to p1 and other refers to p2.

Let’s now try subtracting p2 from p1 again:

>>> p1=Point((1,2,3))
>>> p2=Point((1,2,3))
>>> p1-p2
0.0
>>> p2=Point((1,2,4))
>>> p1-p2
1.0


So, you have basically defined the subtraction operator for objects of your Point class. Can you define other mathematical operators in such a fashion? Sure. Learn all about it here.

Here is the complete program (works with both Python 2 and 3):

from __future__ import print_function
import math

class Point():

def __init__(self, point):
self.point = point

def __str__(self):
return 'Point: {0}'.format(str(self.point))

def __sub__(self, other):
s=0
for x1,x2 in zip(self.point, other.point):
s = s + (x1-x2)**2

return math.sqrt(s)


You may want to add the logic to your __sub__() method so that it checks if the points are of the same dimension. If not, then print a nice error message instead of printing a traceback. That’s it.