Asterisk sign before the 'self' keyword

[christian.posta]

On Feb 11, 9:57 am, "christian.posta" <christian.po... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Feb 11, 9:10 am, Robert Kern <robert.k... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On 2/11/11 9:06 AM, christian.posta wrote:
>
> > > I searched quickly to see whether this may have been discussed before,
> > > but it's possible my search criteria was not refined enough to get any
> > > hits. Forgive me if this is a silly question..
>
> > > I was reading some Python code from a third-party app for the django
> > > project... i saw this in the code and I wasn't certain what it means,
> > > nor could I find anything helpful from google.
>
> > > Within the __call__ function for a class, I saw a method of that class
> > > referred to like this:
>
> > > *self.<method_name_here>()
>
> > > The brackets indicate the method name.
> > > What does the *self refer to??
> > > Does it somehow indicate the scope of the 'self' variable?
>
> > Can you show the whole statement? Most likely, this was embedded in some other
> > call, e.g.:
>
> >    foo(*self.method())
>
> > If this is the case, the * does not bind to "self"; it binds to all of
> > (self.method()), i.e.:
>
> >    foo(*(self.method()))
>
> > This is just the foo(*args) syntax that unpacks a tuple into individual
> > arguments to pass to foo().
>
> >http://docs.python.org/tutorial/controlflow.html#unpacking-argument-l...
>
> > --
> > Robert Kern
>
> > "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
> >   that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
> >   an underlying truth."
> >    -- Umberto Eco
>
> Yep, you are correct!
> It is indeed part of a larger statement. Sorry for the confusion.
>
> Here is the entire snippet:
>
>     def get_urls(self):
>         # In Django 1.1 and later you can hook this in to your urlconf
>         from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns
>         return patterns('', *self.get_urlpatterns())

Thank you both Ian and Robert. It now makes perfect sense!

Thanks!!