Creating an instance of type(self) dynamically without calling __init__?

Question

This is quite hard to explain. I have a class which should support the method copy_stateonly(). It should return a crippled version of the object which only contains the (copied) data members that I want. I hope this example explains it better:

# everything inherits from this
class SuperBase:
    def __init__(self):
        self.state_var = 3 # this should be copied into future objects
        self.non_state_var = 0 # we don't want to copy this

    def copy_stateonly(self):
        newobj = # ??????????? create instance without calling __init__
        newobj.state_var = self.state_var
        return newobj

# some clases inherit from this
class Base(SuperBase):
    def __init__(self):
        SuperBase.__init__(self)
        self.isflying = True # we want to copy this, this is state
        self.sprite = "sprites/plane_generic.png" # we must drop this

    def copy_stateonly(self):
        newobj = SuperBase.copy_stateonly(self)
        newobj.isflying = self.isflying
        return newobj

class A144fighter(Base):
    def __init__(self, teamname): # note required __init__ argument
        Base.__init__(self)
        self.colors = ["black", "grey"] # we want to copy this, this is state
        self.name = teamname # we must drop this

    def copy_stateonly(self):
        newobj = Base.copy_stateonly(self)
        newobj.colors = self.colors[:]
        return newobj

plane = A144fighter("team_blue")
plane_state = plane.copy_stateonly() # this should return an A144fighter object with only state_var, flying and colors set.

Python 2.7

Answer 1

I'm not aware of a way to create new instances of classic classes (which is what you used in your example) without calling __init__(). New instances of new-style classes (descendants of object) can be created using

object.__new__(cls)

where cls is the type of object you would like to create.

An alternative is to use copy.copy() for copying, possibly overwriting __getstate__() and __setstate__() to define what should be copied.

Edit: To create a new instance of a classic class cls without calling __init__(), you can use the following hack:

class EmptyClass:
    pass

new_instance = EmptyClass()
new_instance.__class__ = cls
new_instance.__dict__.update(whatever)

Answer 2

Remember that every object has a attribute named __class__. If you do <object>.__class__ it, will return that object's class object (if that makes sense). The class object is callable so you can add parentheses to the end to create a new instance of that class.

newobj = self.__class__()