* in Python

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

placid wrote:
> Duncan Booth wrote:
> 
>>placid wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Hi all,
>>>
>>>Can someone tell me what * in the following code means/does a Google
>>>search didnt turn up anything as i dont know what the * is called
>>>(related to Python and i dont think Python has pointers)
>>>
>>
>>* is for variable number of positional arguments, ** is for variable
>>keyword arguments. The syntax is symmetrical when defining functions and
>>when calling them.
>>
>>See http://docs.python.org/ref/calls.html
>>and http://docs.python.org/ref/function.html
> 
> 
> so * basically means that args is a list

A tuple IIRC

> containing more arguments that
> can change in size, whereas ** means that args is a dictionary of
> key=value arguments?
> 

Why don't you try by yourself in the Python shell ? One of the nice
things with Python is that it's quite easy to explore and experiment.


-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb at xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"