HC Library and *attributes parameter

[Steve Holden]

Efrat Regev wrote:
>   Hello,
> 
>   I'm a really new (and quite bad) Python programmer. While trying to use
> the HC HTML-Generating library, I couldn't figure out how to set a table's
> width to some given width. Moreover, the constructors interface is
> 
> def __init__(self, object = None, align = None, border = None, cellspacing =
> None, cellpaddding = None, *attributes)
> 
>     So, what does *attribute stand for (being a C++ programmer, it looks
> like a pointer, probably not the case). Is it like the C++ ellipsis? If so,
> how can
> I use it?
> 
The notation "*attribute" in the function signature denotes a variable 
number of positional arguments, which are provided to the function body 
as a tuple named attribute.

  >>> def f1(a, b, *c):
  ...   print "a:", a
  ...   print "b:", b
  ...   print "c:", c
  ...
  >>> f1(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
a: 1
b: 2
c: (3, 4, 5)
  >>> f1('one', 'two')
a: one
b: two
c: ()
  >>>

Much easier than varargs in C!

The notation **kw similarly denotes a variable number of keyword 
arguments, which are provided to the function body as a dictionary named kw.

regards
  Steve