Why are Python’s ‘private’ methods not actually private?

Python gives us the ability to create ‘private’ methods and variables within a class by prepending double underscores to the name, like this: __myPrivateMethod(). How, then, can one explain this?

>>> class MyClass:
...     def myPublicMethod(self):
...             print 'public method'
...     def __myPrivateMethod(self):
...             print 'this is private!!'
... 
>>> obj = MyClass()
>>> obj.myPublicMethod()
public method
>>> obj.__myPrivateMethod()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
AttributeError: MyClass instance has no attribute '__myPrivateMethod'
>>> dir(obj)
['_MyClass__myPrivateMethod', '__doc__', '__module__', 'myPublicMethod']
>>> obj._MyClass__myPrivateMethod()
this is private!!

In short, the name scrambling is used to ensure that subclasses don’t accidentally override the private methods and attributes of their superclasses. It’s not designed to prevent deliberate access from outside.

Strictly speaking, private methods are accessible outside their class, just not easily accessible. Nothing in Python is truly private; internally, the names of private methods and attributes are mangled and unmangled on the fly to make them seem inaccessible by their given names.

You can access the __parse method of the MP3FileInfo class by the name _MP3FileInfo__parse. Acknowledge that this is interesting, then promise to never, ever do it in real code. Private methods are private for a reason, but like many other things in Python, their privateness is ultimately a matter of convention, not force.