What are decorators in Python

Question

I am new to Python. Recently I came across a concept called decorators in Python? I read about it but still not clear about it. Can someone explain it to me in simple words?

Answer 1

Python has an interesting feature called decorators to add functionality to an existing code. A decorator takes in a function, adds some functionality and returns it.

In Python, functions are the first class objects, which means that –

• Functions are objects; they can be referenced to, passed to a variable and returned from other functions as well.
• Functions can be defined inside another function and can also be passed as argument to another function.

Decorators are very powerful and useful tool in Python since it allows programmers to modify the behavior of function or class. Decorators allow us to wrap another function in order to extend the behavior of wrapped function, without permanently modifying it.

In Decorators, functions are taken as the argument into another function and then called inside the wrapper function.

@gfg_decorator

def hello_decorator():

    print("Gfg")

  '''Above code is equivalent to -

  def hello_decorator():

    print("Gfg")

hello_decorator = gfg_decorator(hello_decorator)'''

In the above code, gfg_decorator is a callable function, will add some code on the top of some another callable function, hello_decorator function and return the wrapper function.