Asterisk sign before the 'self' keyword

[christian.posta]

On Feb 11, 9:10 am, Robert Kern <robert.k... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/11/11 9:06 AM, christian.posta wrote:
>
>
>
> > I searched quickly to see whether this may have been discussed before,
> > but it's possible my search criteria was not refined enough to get any
> > hits. Forgive me if this is a silly question..
>
> > I was reading some Python code from a third-party app for the django
> > project... i saw this in the code and I wasn't certain what it means,
> > nor could I find anything helpful from google.
>
> > Within the __call__ function for a class, I saw a method of that class
> > referred to like this:
>
> > *self.<method_name_here>()
>
> > The brackets indicate the method name.
> > What does the *self refer to??
> > Does it somehow indicate the scope of the 'self' variable?
>
> Can you show the whole statement? Most likely, this was embedded in some other
> call, e.g.:
>
>    foo(*self.method())
>
> If this is the case, the * does not bind to "self"; it binds to all of
> (self.method()), i.e.:
>
>    foo(*(self.method()))
>
> This is just the foo(*args) syntax that unpacks a tuple into individual
> arguments to pass to foo().
>
> http://docs.python.org/tutorial/controlflow.html#unpacking-argument-l...
>
> --
> Robert Kern
>
> "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
>   that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
>   an underlying truth."
>    -- Umberto Eco

Yep, you are correct!
It is indeed part of a larger statement. Sorry for the confusion.

Here is the entire snippet:

    def get_urls(self):
        # In Django 1.1 and later you can hook this in to your urlconf
        from django.conf.urls.defaults import patterns
        return patterns('', *self.get_urlpatterns())