Question

I am creating a module in python that can take multiple arguments. What would be the best way to pass the arguments to the definition of a method?

def abc(arg):
    ...

abc({"host" : "10.1.0.100", "protocol" : "http"})

def abc(host, protocol):
    ...

abc("10.1.0.100", "http")

def abc(**kwargs):
    ...

abc(host = "10.1.0.100", protocol = "http")

Or something else?

Edit

I will actually have those arguments (username, password, protocol, host, password2) where none of them are required.

Answer 1

def abc(host, protocol):
    ...

abc("10.1.0.100", "http")
abc(host="10.1.0.100", protocol="http")

If you call it using positional args or keyword args depends on the number of arguments and if you skip any. For your example I don’t see much use in calling the function with keyword args.

---

Now some reasons why the other solutions are bad:

abc({"host" : "10.1.0.100", "protocol" : "http"})

This is a workaround for keyword arguments commonly used in languages which lack real keyword args (usually JavaScript). In those languages it is nice, but in Python it is just wrong since you gain absolutely nothing from it. If you ever want to call the functions with args from a dict, you can always do abc(**{...}) anyway.

def abc(**kwargs):

People expect the function to accept lots of – maybe even arbitrary – arguments. Besides that, they don’t see what arguments are possible/required and you’d have to write code to require certain arguments on your own.