Organisation of python classes and their methods

[Martin Hewitson]

Dear list,

I'm relatively new to Python and have googled and googled but haven't found a reasonable answer to this question, so I thought I'd ask it here.

I'm beginning a large Python project which contains many packages, modules and classes. The organisation of those is clear to me.

Now, the classes can contain many methods (100s of data analysis methods) which operate on instances of the class they belong to. These methods can be long and complex. So if I put these methods all in the module file inside the class, the file will get insanely long. Reading on google, the answer is usually "refactor", but that really doesn't make sense here. It's just that the methods are many, and each method can be a long piece of code. So, is there a way to put these methods in their own files and have them 'included' in the class somehow? I read a little about mixins but all the solutions looked very hacky. Is there an official python way to do this? I don't like having source files with 100's of lines of code in, let alone 1000's.

Many thanks,

Martin