How to remove redundancy of subclasses?

Question

I have created a class Character and a subclass Player. I want to create an instance of the Player subclass but specify the self.variables during instantiation.

class Character():
    def __init__(self):
        self.ID = None
        self.Name = None
        self.Colour = None

class Player(Character):
    def __init__(self, ID, Name, Colour):
        self.ID = ID
        self.Name = Name
        self.Colour = Colour
        self.Karma = 0
        self.Charisma = 0
        self.Strength = 0
        self.Intelligence = 0

I can easily create an instance by using Player("tutorial_guy", "Tutorial Ted", "Green") but then that defeats the whole point of a subclass because of how the subclass Player is set up. How would I make the variables of ID, Name and Colour be set in Character but still instantiated the same way?

Are you asking how to reuse the parent class constructor in the child class? — MisterMiyagi, Aug 03 '19 at 17:14
what is `NPC` you described in the question? What you are describing is simply the basic concept of inheritance. Your `Character` init method should take the required arguments and assign them, and then the `Player` init will call `super()` with those arguments to reuse the code — Tomerikoo, Aug 03 '19 at 17:15
Possible duplicate of [Inheritance and init method in Python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5166473/inheritance-and-init-method-in-python) — MisterMiyagi, Aug 03 '19 at 17:17
My question is based around using `super()`, I don't know how to implement it — nx_prv, Aug 03 '19 at 17:26

wjandrea · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-03T17:58:40.340

There's no reason to subclass Character if it doesn't really do anything. So let's make it set ID, Name, Colour and then use super() to call its __init__ method.

(UpperCamelCase names should be reserved for classes, so I'm using id_, name, colour -- id_ to avoid shadowing the builtin id().)

class Character():
    def __init__(self, id_, name, colour):
        self.id_ = id_
        self.name = name
        self.colour = colour

class Player(Character):
    def __init__(self, id_, name, colour):
        super().__init__(id_, name, colour)
        self.karma = 0
        self.charisma = 0
        self.strength = 0
        self.intelligence = 0

p.s. I'm just getting into OOP so please lmk if I'm confused

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 03 '19 at 17:39

Include the attribute as a class Character() inside Player():

class Character():
    def __init__(self):
        self.ID = None
        self.Name = None
        self.Colour = None
    def setAttributes(self, ID, Name, Colour) :
        self.ID = ID
        self.Name = Name
        self.Colour = Colour
    def showAttributes(self) :
        print(self.ID)
        print(self.Name)
        print(self.Colour)

class Player(Character):
    def __init__(self, ID, Name, Colour):
        self.char = Character()
        self.char.setAttributes( ID, Name, Colour )
        self.ID = ID
        self.Name = Name
        self.Colour = Colour
        self.Karma = 0
        self.Charisma = 0
        self.Strength = 0
        self.Intelligence = 0

a = Player("me", "Tim", "red")

### OUTPUT
>>> a.showAttributes()
me
Tim
red

if you want to keep the same initialization configuration, otherwise you can specify the Character char at __init__ etc

How to remove redundancy of subclasses?

2 Answers2