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Aman Kapoor
Python Development Techdegree Student 25,113 PointsCan someone help with kwargs and args?
Kenneth Love : I have recently gotten to including **kwargs and *args into my functions and I understand how to implement them into my code but the only part I am unsure about is the cases in which you'd use each. Are there certain situations in which I would use one over the other? Or can they be interchanged? If you could help me with this I would be very grateful.
1 Answer
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher*args is a tuple of ordered arguments where you're not sure of the number of them. **kwargs is a dict of keyword arguments where you don't know the number or the name.
Let's say I have a function that'll add together any number of numbers passed into it. I don't know how many numbers I'll get and they don't need names, so I'd use *args.
def sum(*args):
total = 0
for number in args:
total += number
return number
If I had a function, though, that needed to, say, collect a username, password, and then any extra details the user wanted to contribute, I could use **kwargs.
def create_user(username, password, **kwargs):
user = User.new(username, password, extra_data=json.dumps(kwargs))