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Class vs Instance Variable

Class vs Instance Variable

TL;DR

  • Class variables are for data shared by all instances of a class. They belong to a class, not a specific instance and are shared among all instances of a class.
  • Instance variables are for data that is unique to each instance. They belong to individual object instances and are not shared among the other instances of a class. Each instance variable gets a unique backing store specific to the instance.
  • Class variables can be incautiously “shadowed” by instance variables of the same name, which could introduceds bugs and odd behaviour.
  • Be careful and double-check your scoping when dealing with shared state on a class. Automated tests and peer reviews help greatly with that.

Class Variable vs. Instance Variable

Two kinds of data attributes on Python objects

  • Class variables

    • Declared inside the class definition (but outside of any instance methods)
    • Not tied to any particular instance of a class
    • Class variables store their contents on the class itself, and all objects created from a particular class share access to the same set of class variables.
      • I.e.modifying a class variable affects all object instances at the same time.

  • Instance variables

    • Always tied to a particular object instance

    • Contents of an instance vari- able are completely independent from one object instance to the next.

      • I.e. modifying an instance variable only affects one object instance at a time.

Example

class Dog:
    num_legs = 4 # class variabel

    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name # instance variable

>>> jack = Dog('Jack') 
>>> jill = Dog('Jill') 
>>> jack.name, jill.name 
('Jack', 'Jill')

We can access the num_legs class variable either directly on each Dog instance or on the class itself :

>>> jack.num_legs, jill.num_legs 
(4, 4)

>>> Dog.num_legs
4

If we try to access an instance variable through the class, it’ll fail with an AttributeError.

>>> Dog.name
AttributeError:
"type object 'Dog' has no attribute 'name'"

The reason is that instance variables are specific to each object instance and are created when the __init__ constructor runs—they do NOT even exist on the class itself.

Now let’s say we want jack to have 6 legs. If we directly modify the num_legs class variable on the Dogclass:

>>> Dog.num_legs = 6

>>> jack.num_legs, jill.num_legs 
(6, 6)

As we can see, modifying a class variable on the class namespace affects all instances of the class.

Let’s roll back the change to the class variable and instead try to give an extra pair o’ legs specifically to jackonly:

>>> Dog.num_legs = 4 
>>> jack.num_legs = 6

>>> jack.num_legs, jill.num_legs, Dog.num_legs 
(6, 4, 4)

It seems ok, and we got the result we wanted. But a pitfalls occurs: we introduced a num_legs instance variable to the jack instance. And now the new num_legs instance variable “shadows” the class variable of the same name, overriding and hiding it when we access the object instance scope.

>>> jack.num_legs, jack.__class__.num_legs 
(6, 4)