MacLochlainns Weblog

Michael McLaughlin's Technical Blog

Site Admin

Basic Python Object

with one comment

One of my students wanted a quick example of a Python object with getters and setters. So, I wrote a little example that I’ll share.

You define this file in a physical directory that is in your $PYTHONPATH, like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
# Define Coordinate class.
class Coordinate:
  # The method that initializes the Coordinate class.
  def __init__ (self, x, y):
    self.x = x
    self.y = y
 
  # Gets the x value from the instance.
  def getX (self):
    return self.x
 
  # Gets the y value from the instance.
  def getY (self):
    return self.y
 
  # Sets the x value in the instance.
  def setX (self, x):
    self.x = x
 
  # Sets the y value in the instance.    
  def setY (self, y):
    self.y = y
 
  # Prints the coordinate pair.
  def printCoordinate(self):
    print (self.x, self.y)

Assuming the file name is Coordinate.py, you can put it into the Python Idle environment with the following command:

from Coordinate import Coordinate

You initialize the class, like this:

g = Coordinate(49,49)

Then, you can access the variables of the class or it’s methods as shown below:

# Print the retrieved value of x from the g instance of the Coordinate class.
print g.getX()
 
# Print the formatted and retrieved value of x from the g instance of the Coordinate class.
print "[" + str(g.getX()) + "]"
 
# Set the value of x inside the g instance of the Coordinate class.
print g.setX(39)
 
# Print the Coordinates as a set.
g.printCoordinate()

You would see the following results:

49
[49]
(39,49)

As always, I hope that helps those looking for a solution.

Written by maclochlainn

October 30th, 2016 at 6:23 pm