How to call positional arguments explicitly from function call

Question

I have a function with positional arguments. as the function is more complex (this is only to show you my purpose), i want to explicitly write in the function call the name of the arguments.

def my_function(a, b, *other):
    print(a)
    print(b)
    for item in other:
        print(item)

I want to avoid writing:

my_function(1, 2, 4,5,6)

and write it like:

my_function(a=1, b=2, other=*[4,5,6])

python (3.x) does not allow writing things like my_function(a=1, b=2, 4,5,6) . we get this error because of the mapping SyntaxError: positional argument follows keyword argument

is there any way i could mention "other" in the signature ? it seems like all names of arguments must be named or nothing.

thanks if you have any tip.

Answer 1

No, once you use the first keyword argument when calling, all following arguments must be keyword arguments.

You cannot explicitly set the value to be assigned to the *args or **kwargs parameter, they will be collected according to the callers usage, E.g.,

def f(*args, **kwargs):
  print(f"{args=} {kwargs=}")

>>> f(args="a", kwargs="b")
args=() kwargs={'args': 'a', 'kwargs': 'b'}

An alternative may be to have other take a list of values, instead of using *args.