Message from discussion *args and **kwargs

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From:  JonathanB <doulo...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: *args and **kwargs
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:27:58 -0700
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Ok, this is probably definitely a newbie question, but I have looked
all over the Python library reference material and tutorials which I
can find online and I cannot find a clear definition of what these are
and more importantly how to use them. From what I can tell from their
use in the examples I've seen, they are for passing a variable number
of arguments to a function (which I need to do in a program I am
working on). But how do you use them? Is there a fixed order in which
the arguments within *arg or **kwarg should be passed or will be
called within a function? I realize this probably involves a long-
winded answer to a very simple and common programming problem, so if
someone has a link to TFM, I'll gladly go RTFM. I just can't find it.