Today I am going to explain args and kwargs in python
So far I have learned that:
*args = list of arguments -as positional arguments **kwargs = dictionary - whose keys become separate keyword arguments and the values become values of these arguments.The names *args and **kwargs are only by convention but there's no need not to use them. You would use *args when you're not sure how many arguments might be passed to your function, i.e. it allows you pass an arbitrary number of arguments to your function. For example:
>>> def print_everything(*args):
for count, thing in enumerate(args):
... print '{0}. {1}'.format(count, thing)
...
>>> print_everything('apple', 'banana', 'cabbage')
0. apple
1. banana
2. cabbage
>>> def table_things(**kwargs):
... for name, value in kwargs.items():
... print '{0} = {1}'.format(name, value)
...
>>> table_things(apple = 'fruit', cabbage = 'vegetable')
cabbage = vegetable
apple = fruit
You can use these along with named arguments too. The explicit arguments get values first and then everything else is passed to *args and *kwargs. The named arguments come first in the list. For example:
def table_things(titlestring, **kwargs)
>>> def print_three_things(a, b, c):
... print 'a = {0}, b = {1}, c = {2}'.format(a,b,c)
...
>>> mylist = ['aardvark', 'baboon', 'cat']
>>> print_three_things(*mylist)
a = aardvark, b = baboon, c = cat
As you can see in this case it takes the list (or tuple) of items and matches them to the arguments in the function. Of course, you could have a * both in the function definition and in the function call.
Written by Vivek Soundrapandi
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