=None in the parameters

Good question Mourad. This is tricky.

Short answer is that it did take the variables both times. It also has nothing to do with the =None, which is just a default value. Kenneth just didn't use the name variable in the packer example. He was trying to show that it doesn't get picked up in the **kwargs because it's already been taken by the name variable.

Long answer:

In the packer example, at one point he defines the function with name=None as one parameter. This means you can pass a name to the function, or not, in which case it defaults to None. The defaulting to None doesn't really matter here, though. What's happening in the example is just that name is captured as a local variable in the function, and **kwargs is a separate dict variable that catches any other kwargs passed to the function. By explicitly defining name as a parameter, we can access it in the function's code.

That means we could have expanded the function like this:

def packer(name=None, **kwargs):
    print(kwargs)
    print(name)

And the output of calling packer(name="Kenneth", num=42, spanish_inquisition=None) (see 3:00 in the video) would be:

{'num': 42, 'spanish_inquisition': None}
Kenneth

In unpacker, we again have None as default values, which don't get used unless the function is called without them. In the example, he does use both the first_name and last_name variables, which is why they show up.

Hope that's not too confusing. I really strongly encourage you to jump into a workspace and try these out. Call the function a few different ways. Edit the function to use the various parameters.

Happy coding!

Cheers

-Greg