Passing custom keyword arguments to a function [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

Proper way to use **kwargs in Python (14 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

I have a program that has an update_database() function but I don't know what the keyword arguments will be until runtime, so one time the function is called it may need to be:

table_name = 'example1'
update_database(table_name, column1='...', column3='...')

but another time it may be:

table_name = 'example2'
update_database(table_name, column5='...', column2='...')

So the function calls will need to be a mix of regular arguments and keyword arguments. The keyword argument names I have access to as a list so I can format them any old way I like easy enough but I m not sure if this behaviour is even possible in python.

Does anybody know if/how this may be possible?

UPDATE:

Its also worth noting that the update_database() function is part of an imported module so i cant modify its definition, I could wrap it somehow but I'm not sure if this gains me anything.

Answer 1

You can always use undefined number of keyword arguments in your original function, like:

(In the case of keyword arguments, you have a simple dictionary instead of a list)

def update_database(tname, **columns):
    for key, value in columns.items():
        # do something with key-value pairs

UPDATE:

So I guess, this is what we are talking about in the comment section, am I correct?

# Create dictionaries with keys as keywords and values as argument values
kwargs0 = {'arg0': 0, 'arg1': 2, 'arg2': 5}
kwargs1 = {'arg99': 1, 'arg13': None, 'arg0': 7}

# Call the function and UNPACK the dictionaries
update_database('db_name', **kwargs0)
update_database('db_name', **kwargs1)