How to deal with Pylint's “too-many-instance-attributes” message?

Question

I have just tried to lint some code with Pylint, and the last remaining error is

R0902: too-many-instance-attributes (8/7)

I understand the rat

Answer 1

The answer from Zero Piraeus is a good one. That said, since you provide little context to your init method, not even a real class name, it is difficult to be affirmative, but I would say filename and moddir have nothing to do aside margin, position, etc.

IO operations are often best isolated into functions rather than put into methods. Their are often many different formats and serialization options, and most of the time you do not want to mix them with your object logic (methods). It is easier to add a new IO function that takes some file, string, blob or whatever and returns the object encoded into it than it is to maintain an object that has many methods that handle many different IO operations.