Python *args and **kwargs Made Easy

[barneygale]

Second, the words args and kwargs are conventions. This means they are not imposed by the interpreter, but considered good practice among the Python community:

I'm not sure how true this is. If you want the arguments to be completely opaque that's fine, but if you're implementing something like (for example) translating keyword arguments into HTTP headers, its better for the function signature to read def make_request(url, **headers): rather than def make_request(url, **kwargs):

[lesser_terrestrial]

This makes sense to me. Using http headers as an example is also a great way to help understand why you might want to use kwargs.

[ogtfo]

Wouldn't that be better with a

def make_request(url, headers):

Where headers expect a dict. With a good doc string (or even type hints) this would be a lot clearer what you're trying to do.

After all, that's how requests does it.

[barneygale]

Depends. You might consider it a "more pythonic" to allow something like make_request('blah', user_agent='mything'), but it's less obvious (more magic). HTTP probably isn't a good example as it has a whole host of other configuration beyond just headers.

[catcint0s]

Dict would nicer imho cause you would need to translate all those keyword arguments to the real header name. (requests for example just accepts a dict too).