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Practical Maya Programming with Python

You're reading from   Practical Maya Programming with Python Unleash the power of Python in Maya and unlock your creativity

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2014
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781849694728
Length 352 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
Tools
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Author (1):
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Robert Galanakis Robert Galanakis
Author Profile Icon Robert Galanakis
Robert Galanakis
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Toc

Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introspecting Maya, Python, and PyMEL FREE CHAPTER 2. Writing Composable Code 3. Dealing with Errors 4. Leveraging Context Managers and Decorators in Maya 5. Building Graphical User Interfaces for Maya 6. Automating Maya from the Outside 7. Taming the Maya API 8. Unleashing the Maya API through Python 9. Becoming a Part of the Python Community A. Python Best Practices Index

The args and kwargs parameters

We frequently use functions and methods with asterisk or star characters (*) in their definitions, as shown in the following code snippet:

def spam(*args, **kwargs):
    ...

Programmers unfamiliar with Python are often puzzled when they encounter this for the first time. What does the single and double asterisk/star character do?

We'll start with *args. The single * character tells Python that the function takes a variable number (zero or more) of positional parameters.

>>> def countargs(*args):
...     print 'Passed in', len(args), 'args.'
>>> countargs('a', 'b', 'c')
Passed in 3 args.
>>> countargs()
Passed in 0 args.

You can combine normal positional parameters and *args to require some arguments. The os.path.join method, for example, requires at least one positional argument. Its signature is os.path.join(a, *p).

>>> import os
>>> os.path.join('a',...
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