What does "self" mean in a Python class? Why do we need it?

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IIT Roorkee Grad and an IT Professional with 10 Years of Experience

There are methods and functions in python. Methods specifically refer to functions that are defined within a class or are bound to a particular class. functions on the other hand are not bound to any class and are available globally. So when I am defining a method in a class which needs to call another...
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There are methods and functions in python. Methods specifically refer to functions that are defined within a class or are bound to a particular class. functions on the other hand are not bound to any class and are available globally. So when I am defining a method in a class which needs to call another method inside the same class, how will we do it? If we simply use the method name and pass the parameters it will not work as it will try to find functions defined globally. But if you do self.method_name() then it will work. So this is one scenario that shows the usage of self in python. Using self we can call methods defined inside the current class. Think of the self as a pointer to a class object. So when you do self.method_name() the method_name defined inside the class will execute read less
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Web developer with more than 4 years of experience.

Think about self as a function that i created for myself.(by myself i mean the object) When we use self we are refering to any future instance that we may create and store data. on self we can create any functions and all other things required for that object. self allows us to also access functions...
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Think about self as a function that i created for myself.(by myself i mean the object) When we use self we are refering to any future instance that we may create and store data. on self we can create any functions and all other things required for that object. self allows us to also access functions of the current class inside the same class. read less
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