I want to forbid further assignments on some attributes of a class after it was initialized. For instance; no one can explicitly assign any value to 'ssn' (social security number) property after the Person instance 'p' has been initialized. _setattr_ is also being called while assigning the value inside _init_ method, thus it is not what I want. I'd like to restrict only further assignments. How can I achieve that?
class Person(object):
def __init__(self, name, ssn):
self.name = name
self._ssn = ssn
def __setattr__(self, name, value):
if name == '_ssn':
raise AttributeError('Denied.')
else:
object.__setattr__(self, name, value)
>> p = Person('Ozgur', '1234')
>> AttributeError: Denied.
The usual way is to use a "private" attribute starting with an underscore, and a read-only property for public access:
import operator
class Person(object):
def __init__(self, name, ssn):
self.name = name
self._ssn = ssn
ssn = property(operator.attrgetter("_ssn"))
Note that this does not really hinder anybody to change the attribute _ssn
, but the leading _
documents that the attribute is private.