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I know that *args are used when you dunno how many args are being used inside the function call. However, what do I do when I want one group of *args to do X and one group of *args to do y?

Emanuel Jönsson
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    You can't. There's only one set of *args per function. – Morgan Thrapp Nov 17 '16 at 14:10
  • can you expound? is it your function, what are you trying to do? what's 'one group of args'-a certain number or a certain time or something else? – depperm Nov 17 '16 at 14:12
  • group the args into two groups either before or after the function call. – Steven Summers Nov 17 '16 at 14:14
  • There are a few ways to do function calls. The two ways to define parameter-requirmenets off functions looks like this `def x(*args, **kwargs)` or `def x(x, y=None)`. And some example calls to functions can look like this: `x(1,2)`, `x(1, y=2)` or `x(1, *{y : 2}). Not sure what you need really.. – Torxed Nov 17 '16 at 14:14
  • `*args` is used when you want all arguments reduced to a single list. If you want one group of args to do X and one to do Y, then you presumably don't want all of your arguments reduced to a single list, therefore you do not want to use `*args`. – dsclose Nov 17 '16 at 14:17

2 Answers2

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You can not pass two *args within the single function. You need to pass args1 and args2 as plain list and you may pass these lists as args to the functions doing X and Y. For example:

def do_X(*args):
    # Do something

def do_Y(*args):
    # Do some more thing

def my_function(list1, list2):
    do_X(*list1)  # Pass list as `*args` here
    do_Y(*list2)

And your call to my_function would be like:

args_1 = ['x1', 'x2']  # Group of arguments for doing `X`
args_2 = ['y1', 'y2']  # Group of arguments for doing `Y`

# Call your function
my_function(args_1, args_2)
Moinuddin Quadri
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0

In that case you take the arguments as two separate lists, which can default to an empty list or None.

John Zwinck
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