What is super() in python
In python programming language, super() method return an object which allows you to refer to the super class, let us see how this works using the example below
class Person:
def __init__(self, name, age):
self.name = name
self.age = age
class Employee(Person):
def __init__(self, name, age, salary):
super().__init__
(name, age) # this will call the person __init__
self.salary = salary
emp = Employee('Baraka', 28, 120000)
print('The employee name is: ', emp.name)
print('The employee age is: ', emp.age)
print('The employee salary is: ', emp.salary)
The output of the above code is
The employee name is: Baraka
The employee age is: 28
The employee salary is: 120000
In the above example, we have two classes, the first class is Person class and the second is an Employee class
The person class has an __init__
method which takes in name
and age
such that when you create a Person object , the name
and age
get set automatically by the __init__
method .
When creating a Person object you have to pass in name
and age
,
for example , p1 = Person("Baraka", 28)
The second class is the Employee class which inherits from the Person class, and therefore it gets all the properties and methods of the parent class.
In our example, the Employee class takes in name
, age
and salary
, this can be seen in its __init__
method
After the __init__
method of the Employee class , we have this line super().__init__(name, age)
, this means that we are calling the __init__
method of the parent class, in our example , the parent class is the Person class.
Now we have this line self.salary = salary
, here we are adding the salary property in the __init__
method of the Person class to the value of salary which was provided in the Employee class __init__
method.
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