Adding Arbitrary Attributes To Python Class

Jun 23, 2021

You want to create a dummy class that stores arbitrary attributes and you want to access these attributes via . (dot) operator e.g. myClass.age. You can easily do that in Python. Although using a dictionary type would be more explicit and Pythonic 😉.

The Solution

class PlaceholderClass:
    def __init__(self, **kwargs):
        for key in kwargs.keys():
            setattr(self, key, kwargs[key])


my_row = PlaceholderClass(name='Jon', surname='Snow', age='died?')
print(my_row.name)
print(my_row.surname)
print(my_row.age)

One case I would find this class useful is when you want to declare a single database row. In this case, each row would be a single instance of a class. And the whole result set could be added to a list.