The Python `super()` method explained

The Python super() method lets us access methods from a parent class from within a child class. This helps reduce repetition in our code.

Overwriting functionality

In following example, we have a parent and a child class. The the child class is inheriting from the parent. By defining a method on the child with the same method name that exists on the parent, we overwrite it.

When creating a new instance and calling do_something(), only the code block from the child class will be executed.

class Parent:
    def do_something(self):
        print('Parent is doing something')

class Child(Parent):
    def do_something(self):
        print('Child is overwriting something')

kid = Child()
kid.do_something()

Output:

Child is overwriting something

Extending functionality

class Parent:
    def do_something(self):
        print('Parent is doing something')

class Child(Parent):
    def do_something(self):
        super().do_something()
        print('Child is doing something else')

kid = Child()
kid.do_something()

Output:

Parent is doing something Child is doing something else

Use cases

• When using a framework and inheriting from pre-built classes, we might still want to use the functionality from the source code, but want to modify it a little bit. We could either copy paste the source code and overwrite the corresponding method, or we could actually make use of super() to call the method on the parent as it would work out of the box and then extend the functionality, as shown in above example..