Notes - Friday 01/15/21

Friday 01/15/21

Today I wanted to work on the test and comprehension part of the course which can be seen here. They threw in something called *args and **kwargs in the middle of my coding practice. So let's learn about args.

*args and **kwargs

*args

These are functional parameters. Arguments are *args and pronounced "star args" and keyword arguments are **kwargs and pronounced "double star qw-ar-gs". These are things in Python functions that allow for the code to accept an abitrary number of arguments and keyword arguments without pre-defining parameters in the function calls.

So let's say we want to setup a function that will return 5% of the sum of 2 numbers. But what if I then want to change the function to take a variable or arbitrary amount of arguments. So then I don't have to define the number numbers the function will do. Note that the *args will become a tuple. The *args could technically be anything; it could be *urwordshere or *spam. Best practice is to call it *args.

**kwargs

Python offers a way to handle an arbitrary number of key word arguements. It creates a dictionary of key value pairs. So it does the same thing that *args does where that returns a tuple, but instead returns a dictionary. Then the user can define values in the dictionary that can be messed with inside the function. Again **kwargs could be anything after ``**urnamehere. Best practice is to call it **kwargs``` so it's easy to recognize.

Why *args and **kwargs?

They're useful to use when you pull in outside libraries. They might not be useful now but will be useful later. Note that they can be combined