"donkeyboy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > This is probably a really basic question, but anyway ... > > I'm new to both Python and OO programming. From looking at a number of > code examples, the word "self" is used a lot when referring to classes. > As such, what does "self" mean and/or do? I've read things that say > it's a naming convention, but no-one has really spelt it out (in idiot > form!) in a way I can understand. > > Any help you can provide would be great: at the moment, when code > doesn't work as expected, I'm randomly sprinkling "self"s in all over > the place to see if that helps, but without much of an idea of what it > really achieves. > > Thanks in advance!! >
To put it simply, a class needs a way to know which instance (of itself!) to operate on. If you have a class "str" (and Python has that built in!), then there will be many instances of class "str" in a typical program. The parameter "self" refers to the particular string the class method is being called to operate upon. If you have a method upper() that convert everything to uppercase, your class definition would need the "self" parameter in order to know which particular string to convert. Thomas Bartkus -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
