Shortest way of creating an object with arbitrary attributes in Python?

Question

Hey, I just started wondering about this as I came upon a code that expected an object with a certain set of attributes (but with no specification of what type this object should be). One solution would be to create a new class that has the attributes the code expects, but as I call other code that also needs objects with (other) attributes, I'd have to create more and more classes. A shorter solution is to create a generic class, and then set the attributes on instances of it (for those who thought of using an instance of `object` instead of creating a new class, that won't work since `object` instances don't allow new attributes). The last, shortest solution I came up with was to create a class with a constructor that takes keyword arguments, just like the `dict` constructor, and then sets them as attributes: ``` class data: def __init__(self, **kw): for name in kw: setattr(self, name, kw[name]) options = data(do_good_stuff=True, do_bad_stuff=False) ``` But I can't help feeling like…

Accepted Answer

The original code can be streamlined a little by using `__dict__`:

```
In [1]: class data:
   ...:     def __init__(self, **kwargs):
   ...:         self.__dict__.update(kwargs)
   ...:

In [2]: d = data(foo=1, bar=2)

In [3]: d.foo
Out[3]: 1

In [4]: d.bar
Out[4]: 2
```

In Python 3.3 and greater, this syntax is made available by the `types.SimpleNamespace` class.

Shortest way of creating an object with arbitrary attributes in Python?

Solution

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