Objects are instances of classes. Classes are just the blueprints for objects. So given your class definition -
# Note the added (object) - this is the preferred way of creating new classes
class Student(object):
name = "Unknown name"
age = 0
major = "Unknown major"
You can create a make_student function by explicitly assigning the attributes to a new instance of Student -
def make_student(name, age, major):
student = Student()
student.name = name
student.age = age
student.major = major
return student
But it probably makes more sense to do this in a constructor (__init__) -
class Student(object):
def __init__(self, name="Unknown name", age=0, major="Unknown major"):
self.name = name
self.age = age
self.major = major
The constructor is called when you use Student(). It will take the arguments defined in the __init__ method. The constructor signature would now essentially be Student(name, age, major).
If you use that, then a make_student function is trivial (and superfluous) -
def make_student(name, age, major):
return Student(name, age, major)
For fun, here is an example of how to create a make_student function without defining a class. Please do not try this at home.
def make_student(name, age, major):
return type('Student', (object,),
{'name': name, 'age': age, 'major': major})()