[Tutor] Modify inherited methods

[Eike Welk]

On Wednesday April 28 2010 20:57:27 C M Caine wrote:
> Thank you all. One tangentially related question: what does (self,
> *args, **kwargs) actually mean? How does one reference variables given
> to a function that accepts these inputs?

*args is a tuple containing the positional arguments; 
**kwargs is a dictionary which contains the keyword arguments. 

The stars before the variable names are the special syntax to handle arbitrary 
function arguments; you can use any variable names you want. You can use the 
syntax in a function call and in a function definition.

Here's an example session with Ipython:

In [5]: def foo(*args, **kwargs):
   ...:     print "args: ", args
   ...:     print "kwargs: ", kwargs
   ...:
   ...:

In [6]: foo(1, 2, 3)
args:  (1, 2, 3)
kwargs:  {}

In [7]: foo(1, 2, 3, a=4, b=5)
args:  (1, 2, 3)
kwargs:  {'a': 4, 'b': 5}

In [8]: foo( *(10, 11), **{"p":20, "q":21})
args:  (10, 11)
kwargs:  {'q': 21, 'p': 20}


Eike.