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Adiv Abramson
6,919 PointsMust a dict parameter in a function necessarily be preceded by **?
I saw on another tutorial on YouTube that when passing a dict to a function, the corresponding parameter should be preceded by **, e.g. my_function(**dict_param, reg_param). But when I tried to use this syntax in the code challenge I got an invalid syntax error. Can you advise? Thanks
2 Answers
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher** unpacks a dictionary and turns its keys and values into keywords and values. For example, the following two lines are exactly the same.
call_me(**{'name': 'Kenneth', 'number': '555-555-5555'})
call_me(name='Kenneth', number='555-555-5555')
It's handy if all of your keywords and values are already in a dictionary and you want to just pass them in.
One thing to note, you can't use keyword arguments (kwargs) before positional arguments (args). So you can't do call_me(**phone_dict, some_other_var) but you can do call_me(some_other_var, **phone_dict).
Adiv Abramson
6,919 PointsThanks a lot. And yes, I forgot that the order of parameters is important. Just like a ParamArray in /VBA?/ (regular expressioning there, LOL), a dict parameter can appear in the function parameter list only after the positional arguments.