Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Modules, Classes, and Methods

In ​Importing Modules​, we saw that a module is a kind of object, one that can contain functions and other variables. There is another kind of object that is similar to a module: a class. You’ve been using classes all along, probably without realizing it: a class is how Python represents a type.

You may have called built-in function help on int, float, bool, or str. We’ll do that now with str (notice that the first line says that it’s a class):

>>> help(str)
Help on class str in module builtins:

class str(object)
 |  str(object[, encoding[, errors]]) -> str
 |
 |  Create a new string object from the given object. If encoding or
 |  errors is specified, then the object must expose a data buffer