Why use "locals()"

[Sion Arrowsmith]

Sean DiZazzo  <half.italian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> def print_item(item):
>>      description = textwrap.fill(item.description, 40)
>>      short = item.description.split('\n', 1)[0]
>>      code = str(item.id).zfill(6)
>>      print "%(code)s %(short)s\n%(description)s\n" % locals()
>
>I see the use of that, but according to Zen, "Explicit is better than
>implicit."

I'm having trouble imaginging what a "more explicit" version would be.

I use this idiom a lot for code generation, finding it much more
readable than:

"%s %s\n%s\n" % (code, short, description)

or even:

code + ' ' + short + '\n' + description + '\n'

What I'm not clear about is under what circumstances locals() does
not produce the same result as vars() .

-- 
\S

   under construction