* in Python

[placid]

Duncan Booth wrote:
> placid wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Can someone tell me what * in the following code means/does a Google
> > search didnt turn up anything as i dont know what the * is called
> > (related to Python and i dont think Python has pointers)
> >
> * is for variable number of positional arguments, ** is for variable
> keyword arguments. The syntax is symmetrical when defining functions and
> when calling them.
>
> See http://docs.python.org/ref/calls.html
> and http://docs.python.org/ref/function.html

so * basically means that args is a list containing more arguments that
can change in size, whereas ** means that args is a dictionary of
key=value arguments?