When writing code, you have inevitably needed to store data throughout your pipeline. In these cases you store your value, list or data frame as a variable to easily use it elsewhere in your code. However, sometimes your data has an awkward form, consisting of a number of different length lists or data of different types and sizes. While it is still doable to work with, and using tuples or dictionaries can help, accessing different elements in your data quickly becomes messy and it is less intuitive what your code is actually doing.

To solve the above stated problem, data classes were introduced as a new feature in Python 3.7. A data class is a regular Python class, but with certain methods already implemented for you. This makes them easy to create and removes a lot of boilerplate (repeated code) making them simpler, more intuitive and pretty. Further, as data classes are part of the standard library, you can directly import it without needing to install any external dependencies (noice).

With the sales pitch out of the way, let us look at how we can use data classes.

from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import Any

@dataclass
class Antibody:
    vgene: str
    jgene: None
    sequence: Any = 'EVQ'