We want to initialize instances of the Rectangle
class with the values of both width
and height
. After we create an instance of a class, Python automatically calls the __init__
method. Thus, we can use this method to receive both the width
and height
arguments. We can then use these arguments to initialize attributes with the same names. We can think of the __init__
method as the equivalent of a constructor in other object-oriented programming languages.
The following lines create a Rectangle
class and declare an __init__
method within the body of the class:
class Rectangle: def __init__(self, width, height): print("I'm initializing a new Rectangle instance.") self.width = width self.height = height
This method receives three arguments: self
, width
, and height
. The first argument is a reference to the instance that called the method. We used the name self
for this argument. It is important to notice that self
is not a Python keyword...