Magic Methods are the special methods which gives us the ability to access built in syntactical features such as ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘==’, ‘+’ etc…

You must have worked with such methods without knowing them to be as magic methods. Magic methods can be identified with their names which start with __ and ends with __ like init, call, str etc. These methods are also called Dunder Methods, because of their name starting and ending with Double Underscore (Dunder).

Now there are a number of such special methods, which you might have come across too, in Python. We will just be taking an example of a few of them to understand how they work and how we can use them.

1. init

class AnyClass:
    def __init__():
        print("Init called on its own")
obj = AnyClass()

The first example is _init, _and as the name suggests, it is used for initializing objects. Init method is called on its own, ie. whenever an object is created for the class, the init method is called on its own.

The output of the above code will be given below. Note how we did not call the init method and it got invoked as we created an object for class AnyClass.

Init called on its own

2. add

Let’s move to some other example, add gives us the ability to access the built in syntax feature of the character +. Let’s see how,

class AnyClass:
    def __init__(self, var):
        self.some_var = var
    def __add__(self, other_obj):
        print("Calling the add method")
        return self.some_var + other_obj.some_var
obj1 = AnyClass(5)
obj2 = AnyClass(6)
obj1 + obj2

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