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Comment by postfuturist | Hacker News Reader

Python tip: instead of making the user contstruct a list literal, just use (star)args in the function definition. Python will automatically pack up any number of positional arguments into a list for you!

    def search(*args) : ... # args is a sequence

    search(this, that, the_other_thing)

Edit: found the HN FAQ entry on formatting comments, finally.

View on HN

Just to clarify for anyone who isn't familiar with Python: it's asterisk followed by "args". The problem here is that HN comments system interprets asterisk as italic formatting ;)

Edit: Parent comment fixed by postfuturist.

Python 3 lets you have named keyword arguments too. Anything after the star-args is a named keyword argument, and you can have a simple star if you do not want the argument list:

    def search(foo, bar, *, baz):

Then, foo and bar would be named arguments, and baz would need to be passed by keyword.

> Edit: found the HN FAQ entry on formatting comments, finally.

Really? Where?

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Swell! Would you happen to know how to format quotations?

As in the "Ask HN" type posts? You can simply enter something into the text field when making a submission. It will then ignore the URL field.

This is a great point and is something we're planning on adding in an upcoming release of our Python library.

  def search(*args): ...

and you can be extra nice and accept either a list or positional arguments...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com