Function that knows the names of its actual parameters

[John W. Baxter]

In article <394a6395.7217524 at news.btx.dtag.de>, spamfranke at bigfoot.de 
(Stefan Franke) wrote:

> I found myself in need for the following functionality a couple of times:
> 
> >>> a=1
> >>> b="foo"
> >>> c=b
> >>> magic(c, b, a)
> {'a': 1, 'b': 'foo', 'c': 'foo'}
> 
> that is, a function that goes one step further than **dict arguments and 
> returns
> a dictionary with names and values of its actual parameters.
> It's useful every time one tries to write generators for Python or other 
> code (right
> now I'm writing some SQL code emitting functions).

I would think that this method should point the way (you can have some 
positional arguments as well, along with named keyword ones, plus the 
catchall):

>>> def m(**args):
...   print args
... 
>>> m(a=5, b='ten')
{'b': 'ten', 'a': 5}

One example is on page 109 of "Learning Python",  with discussion 
preceeding and following.

  --John

-- 
John W. Baxter   Port Ludlow, WA USA  jwbnews at scandaroon.com