How does Thread.__init__(self) in a class work?

Question

So I found this code:

from threading import Thread
class Example(Thread):
    def __init__(self):
        Thread.__init__(self)

    def run (self):
                 


        

Answer 1

__init__() method is called when an object is initialized. And when you do - Thread.__init__(self) , it just just calling the parent class' __init__() method .

Like said in comment you can remove it and the functionality should remain same. In your class the __init__() is completely redundant.

This method is called when you do -

Example()

When you create the new object for Example() .

The run() method is called, when you do - .start() on the Example() object. This is done by the Thread.start() method, from documentation -

start()

Start the thread’s activity.

It must be called at most once per thread object. It arranges for the object’s run() method to be invoked in a separate thread of control.

---

Adding one more print statement and dividing Example().start() into two lines so you can understand this clearly -

>>> from threading import Thread
>>> class Example(Thread):
...     def __init__(self):
...         Thread.__init__(self)
...         print("In __init__")
...     def run (self):
...         print("It's working!")
...
>>> e = Example()
In __init__
>>> e.start()
It's working!