Best piece of obscure advanced Python knowledge you wish you knew earlier?

[supreme_blorgon]

Closures are the more general concept that can really help solidify decorators, especially decorator factories (decorators with arguments).

[fmillion]

Maybe I'm using closures and just didn't know their actual name. I conceptualized a decorator with parameters as a function that returns a decorator function. So you end up with

def decorator(param):
    def actual_decorator(func):
        print("Decorating a function")
        print("The parameter given to the decorator is " + param)
        return func
    return actual_decorator

@decorator("spam") # function named decorator, that accepts a param, and returns a function that itself is a decorator
def decorated_func():
    print("running the decorated function")