Convenient improvised classes in Python

When writing a test suite for a little project I'm working on (multi-part blog post forthcoming), I wanted to return an array of objects from a function. Since they were only going to hold some values that would be passed to another function and then forgotten, I didn't feel like writing a proper class for them. The standard way would be to return a tuple or a dictionary, but I prefer the attribute access notation (foo.bar) to indexing (foo["bar"]), especially when sending the object to some other function that doesn't really care to keep track of what's a normal object and what just happens to be a dictionary because I was lazy.

So, what can be done? Turns you you can both have your cake and eat it too.

class improvise(object):
        def __init__(self, **kws):
                for (name, value) in kws.items():
                        setattr(self, name, value)

This little class takes keyword arguments to its constructor, and assigns each key/value pair as attributes on the instance. Use it like this: improvise(from_user=from_user, subject=subject, query=query), and the caller then gets an object that can be used like this: message.subject. Since the class doesn't care about which keyword arguments are used, it can be re-used by every function that wants to return objects without having to declare classes for them.

Chalk up one more for the flexibility of Python. Which, by the way, zooms.