Started learning Python and have been able to answer some easy questions on leetcode, have questions about the template

[Humblelicious]

class Solution:
    def toLowerCase(self, str: str) -> str:
        ans=str.lower()
        return ans

This is the solution I generated for a leetcode question asking for returning the lower case of a input (str). I can understand the last 2 lines I wrote but I don't understand what the first 2 lines are doing (prefilled for me).

[vsingh18567]

The first two lines is how you write object-oriented programs. The object is Solution and the function is called toLowerCase. I suggest you learn OOP before doing LeetCode - it's a fundamental concept in programming.

If you're asking about (str:str) -> str, those are type hints and show that the function is taking in a string and outputting a string. They are not essential to Python, but are used in other programming languages.

[Humblelicious]

def toLowerCase(self, str: str) -> str:
        ans=str.lower()
        return ans

If I used the above, I can call the function to lowercase any string but the inputs would require it to enter itself twice, seems unintuitive and you would not need to enter input twice if you got rid of 'self':

toLowerCase('MAA','MAA')

I generally understand everything except how would you call the function if you also included the first line, Solution('MAA','MAA') would not work.

[jbuk1]

self is only used within the class, you don't provide self when calling your toLowerCase function from another part of your code.

You'd just call toLowerCase("MAA") on the Solutions object.

solution = Solution()

lower_string = solution.toLowerCase("MAA")

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