Python Projects for Beginners a ten-Week Bootcamp Approach to Python Programming

** kwargs

Like args, kwargs allows us to take in an arbitrary number of values in a function; however, it works as a dictionary with keyword arguments instead. Keyword arguments are values passed in with keys, which allow us to access them easily within the function block. Again, the magic here is in the two unary operators (_**) not the keyword of kwargs. Let’s check it out:

# using kwargs parameter to take in a dictionary of arbitrary values def outputData(**kwargs): print( type(kwargs) ) print( kwargs[ "name" ] ) print( kwargs[ "num" ] ) outputData(name = "John Smith", num = 5, b = True)

Go ahead and run the cell. This time we can see that the type is a dictionary and we’re able to output each key-value pair within the kwargs parameter like we would with any other dictionary. The keyword arguments within this cell are in the function call, where we specifically declare a key and value to be passed into the function.

CHapTeR 5

FUnCTIonS

TUESDAY EXERCISES

1. 
   User Input: ask the user to input a word, and pass that word into a function that checks if the word starts with an uppercase. If it does output “True”, otherwise “False”.
   
2. 
   No Name: Define a function that takes in two arguments, first_name and last_ name, and makes both optional. If no values are passed into the parameters, it should output “No name passed in”; otherwise, it should print out the name.
   

Today was all about function parameters and how to use them. The use of parameters makes our functions modular within our program, so that we can successfully reduce the lines of code written.
Wednesday: Return Statement
Up to this point, we’ve been printing out the data that our functions alter, but what do you do if you need to access this information later? This is where the return statement is used. Functions can manipulate data and then send it back to where the function call occurred to save the information to be used for later. Today we’ll learn how to do that and why it’s useful.
To follow along with this lesson, let’s continue from our notebook file “Week_05” and simply add a markdown cell at the bottom that says, “Return Statement.”