Built-In Class Attributes in Python

Every Python class keeps following built-in attributes and they can be accessed using dot operator like any other attribute −

• __dict__ − Dictionary containing the class's namespace.
• __doc__ − Class documentation string or none, if undefined.
• __name__ − Class name.
• __module__ − Module name in which the class is defined. This attribute is "__main__" in interactive mode.
• __bases__ − A possibly empty tuple containing the base classes, in the order of their occurrence in the base class list.

Example

For the above class let us try to access all these attributes −

#!/usr/bin/python
class Employee:
   'Common base class for all employees'
   empCount = 0
   def __init__(self, name, salary):
      self.name = name
      self.salary = salary
      Employee.empCount += 1
   def displayCount(self):
      print "Total Employee %d" % Employee.empCount
   def displayEmployee(self):
      print "Name : ", self.name, ", Salary: ", self.salary
print "Employee.__doc__:", Employee.__doc__
print "Employee.__name__:", Employee.__name__
print "Employee.__module__:", Employee.__module__
print "Employee.__bases__:", Employee.__bases__
print "Employee.__dict__:", Employee.__dict__

Output

When the above code is executed, it produces the following result −

Employee.__doc__: Common base class for all employees
Employee.__name__: Employee
Employee.__module__: __main__
Employee.__bases__: ()
Employee.__dict__: {'__module__': '__main__', 'displayCount':
<function displayCount at 0xb7c84994>, 'empCount': 2,
'displayEmployee': <function displayEmployee at 0xb7c8441c>,
'__doc__': 'Common base class for all employees',
'__init__': <function __init__ at 0xb7c846bc>}