Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Wed Jun 15 00:53:05 EDT 2011

• Previous message (by thread): What is the Most Efficient Way of Printing A Dict's Contents Out In Columns?
• Next message (by thread): What is the Most Efficient Way of Printing A Dict's Contents Out In Columns?
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---

On 6/14/2011 2:37 PM, MRAB wrote:
> On 14/06/2011 18:48, Zach Dziura wrote:
> [snip]
>> I just have one quick question. On the line where you have zip(*arr),
>> what is the * for? Is it like the pointer operator, such as with C? Or
>> is it exactly the pointer operator?
>>
> [snip]
> The * in the argument list of a function call unpacks the following
> list as arguments for the call, for example, zip(*[0, 1, 2]) becomes
> zip(0, 1, 2), so zip(*arr) becomes zip(arr[0], arr[1], ...).
>
> There's also **, which unpacks a dict as keyword arguments.

* and ** in a function call, which distribute arguments,
are essentially the inverse of * and ** in function definitions,
where they say to collect arguments.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy

---

• Previous message (by thread): What is the Most Efficient Way of Printing A Dict's Contents Out In Columns?
• Next message (by thread): What is the Most Efficient Way of Printing A Dict's Contents Out In Columns?
• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---

More information about the Python-list mailing list