I was wondering what is the difference between objects and classes in python? I thought all classes are objects, but in that case, author wouldn't have used phrase "classes and objects".
All objects (with the exception of a few in the standard library, some that implement special access mechanisms using things like descriptors and decorators, or some implemented in C) are mutable. This includes instances of user defined classes, classes themselves, and even the type objects that define the classes.
The answer to this question (while simple) is quite difficult to find. Googling things like "python object base class" or similar comes up with pages and pages of tutorials on object oriented programming. Upvoting because this is the first link that led me to the search terms "old vs. new-style python objects"
In python the simple heuristic for when you should use a class comes down to whether or not your abstraction needs to be concerned with state. Abstractions that carry mutable state should be implemented using a class to express this.
In the context of Python and all other Object Oriented Programming (OOP) languages, objects have two main characteristics: state and behavior. You can think of a constructor as a factory that creates an instance of an object with state and behavior.
Python 3 has only new-style classes that are declared as class A:, class A(object): or class A(B):. For classic-style classes, a comparison operation always calls the method of the first operand, while for new-style classes, it always calls the method of the subclass operand, regardless of the order of the operands.
A simple solution would be to call json.dumps() on the .__dict__ member of that instance. That is a standard Python dict and if your class is simple it will be JSON serializable.
I've seen plenty of examples of people extracting all of the classes from a module, usually something like: # foo.py class Foo: pass # test.py import inspect import foo for name, obj in insp...
