Title: Clean up __init__() methods that contain only attribute assignments.
Submitter: Peter Otten (other recipes)
Last Updated: 2004/04/27
Version no: 1.0
Category: Shortcuts

Description:

Did you ever have to write an initializer whose body consisted of little more than a suite of self.attr = attr style assignments? Here's a utility function that factors out this task.

Source: Text Source

def attributesFromDict(d, obj=None, objName="self"):
    if obj is None:
        obj = d.pop(objName)
    for n, v in d.iteritems():
        setattr(obj, n, v)

class Before:
    def __init__(self, foo, bar, baz, boom=1, bang=2):
        self.foo = foo
        self.bar = bar
        self.baz = baz
        self.boom = boom
        self.bang = bang

class After:
    def __init__(self, foo, bar, baz, boom=1, bang=2):
        attributesFromDict(locals())

Discussion:

As there is no additional logic in After.__init__(), the locals() dictionary contains only the parameters provided. attributesFromDict() by default extracts self and interprets all other items in the dictionary as attribute name/value pairs which are then set.
This is similar to the technique of using only keyword parameters

def __init__(self, **kw): self.__dict__.update(kw)

but the latter lacks an easy way to specify the mandatory/optional parameters and has often proved a showstopper when reading other people's code.

Limitations: As there is no easy way to specify a subset of the local variables, you cannot conveniently use attributesFromDict() in a method with complex logic that needs temporary variables. For the same reason it is not easily applicable in a subclass, that propagates a subset of its parameters to the baseclass initializer.

Credits: John J. Lee originally posted the problem on comp.lang.python, and if you are interested in the strange detours that led to the solution presented above, have a look at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-April/216871.html