What is the purpose of the

The self keyword in Python is used to refer to the instance of an object that a method is being called on. It is a convention to use self as the first argument to instance methods, although you can use any name you like. The purpose of self is to allow the method to access and modify the attributes and properties of the object that it is called on.

Here's an example to illustrate the use of self:

class Car:
    def __init__(self, make, model):
        self.make = make
        self.model = model

    def get_info(self):
        return f"{self.make} {self.model}"

my_car = Car("Toyota", "Camry")
print(my_car.get_info()) # Toyota Camry

In this example, the get_info method takes self as its first argument. This allows the method to access the make and model attributes of the Car object that it is called on (in this case, my_car). If we didn't use self, the method would not know which object's attributes to access.