You don't need to reference the class inside itself, using bar instead of Test.bar will work fine.

class Test:
    @staticmethod
    def bar():
        pass

    FOO_DICT = {1: bar}


# You can access this outside of the class by simply using Test.FOO_DICT
print(Test.FOO_DICT)

However, there are cases where you really need to use a class in itself. For example

class Test:
    @staticmethod
    def bar():
        pass

    def test_with_other_of_same_instance(self, other: Test):
        print(other.FOO_DICT)

    FOO_DICT = {1: bar}

In this case,

• I want to define a method that accepts an object of the same Test class.
• I want to use python's type hinting to indicate that the expected argument is an instance of Test. This allows me get editor support and also so tools like pylance and mypy can notify me of possible errors if I passed a argument of wrong data type.

As at the time of this writing, I'll get a NameError: name 'Test' is not defined.

This is because by default I can't use a class within itself (It is possible later versions of python will change its default behavior, hence we won't be needing the solution below by that time).

But if you use Python versions from 3.7+ and you can't reference a class within itself, the simple solution came with PEP 563 - Postponed evaluation of annotations. It is implemented by adding a little line of code at the first line of the file

from __future__ import annotations
# other imports or code come afterwards


class Test:
    @staticmethod
    def bar():
        pass

    def test_with_other_of_same_instance(self, other: Test):
        print(other.FOO_DICT)

    FOO_DICT = {1: bar}

So you can use a class within itself in python by simply including that line at the beginning of the file.

Normally, if you use pylance or any similar tool, you get a warning or error display to show you that you imported something and didn't use it. But not in the case of annotations. You don't have to worry about any warning from your editor.

Note that this must occur at the beginning of the file otherwise you get a SyntaxError and versions earlier than 3.7 won't support this.

Update

In Python 3.11 the module is named typing instead of typing_extensions

from typing import Self


class Node:
    """Binary tree node."""

    def __init__(self, left: Self, right: Self):
        self.left = left
        self.right = right

This might be helpful:

from typing_extensions import Self


class Node:
    """Binary tree node."""

    def __init__(self, left: Self, right: Self):
        self.left = left
        self.right = right

typing_extensions offers a Self class to reference class itself which I think is most elegent way to self-reference(PEP 673).

As others have mentioned, you can also use string literals. But it comes to problem when you have multiple type hints.

# python 3.10
var: str | int

And then you write something like

class Node:
    def __init__(self, var: 'Node' | SomeClass):
        self.var = var

It will raise a TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for |: 'str' and 'type'.

You need @classmethod rather than @staticmethod - a class method will get passed a reference to the class (where a method will get self), so you can look up attributes on it.

class FooBarBaz:
    BAR = 123

    @classmethod
    def getBar(cls):
        return cls.BAR

If I understand your question correctly, you should be able to reference class A within class A by putting the type annotation in quotes. This is called forward reference.

class A:
  # do something
  def some_func(self, a: 'A')
  # ...

See ref below

1. https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/3661
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJsrxBkV3kc

Use a meta class to automatically set it.

def my_meta(name, bases, attrs):
    cls = type(name, bases, attrs)
    cls.bar = cls
    return cls


class Foo(object):
    __metaclass__ = my_meta


>>> print Foo.bar
<class '__main__.Foo'>

You cannot, because during class definition, the class does not yet exist.

You can apply the decorator after the class has been created:

class A():
    def f(self):
        return 2

    def w(self, f):
        return fr + 5 

A.f = dec(A.w)(A.f.__func__)

or you can swap the order of the two method definitions and refer to w as a local name still:

class A():
    def w(self, f):
        return fr + 5 

    @dec(w)
    def f(self):
        return 2

In both cases you are passing in a callable A.w that is not bound to an instance. No self will be passed in, so you need to add that yourself, in the decorator:

def decorate(w):
    def _wrap(f):
        def _call(self, *args, **kwargs):
            return w(self, f(*args, **kwargs))
        def _call
    return _wrap

If you didn't expect w to be bound (it acting as a static method instead), you could just use a normal function instead here.

Generally speaking, creating a decorator to call another method on the same instance is somewhat pointless; why not just call w from within f, directly?

class A():
    def f(self):
        return self.w(2)

    def w(self, f):
        return fr + 5 

The proper solution is to move the dict outside the class

class A:
    pass

A.mydict = {A: 3, B: 2}

which will result in exactly the values you would get if you could do what you ask for.

Add the class after the class is defined:

class Template():
    _allowed_types = [str, SafeHtml]

Template._allowed_types.append(Template)

The class body, by necessity, is run before the class object can be created, so the name Template is not defined yet. But you can always alter class attributes after the object has been created.