Question

I’ll post my code first, and then ask questions.

def menu(**arg):
    if len(arg) == 0:
        name = raw_input("Enter your name: ")
        location = raw_input("Enter your name: ")
    else:
        for i,j in arg.items():
            globals()[i] = j
    print "Name: %s | Location: %s" % (name, location)

The goal of this function is to print out something like this:

Name: someone | Location: somewhere

If I just input

menu()

OK, no problem, but if I type

menu(name=’someone’, location=’somewhere’)

something went wrong…

If I rewrite it like this:

def menu(**arg):
    if len(arg) == 0:
        pass
    else:
        for i,j in arg.items():
            globals()[i] = j
    print "Name: %s | Location: %s" % (name, location)

and I type

menu(name=’someone’, location=’somewhere’)

it worked… but I don’t know why

Also, why can’t I replace vars() with globals() in the “rewritten version”?

And my last question is …
I found this code verbose and redundant..
Is there any way to make it cleaner and neater?

Thanks for your patience!

Answer 1

I’ll answer your last question:

Is there any way to make it cleaner and neater?

For example:

def menu(name=None, location=None):
    if name is None:
        name = raw_input("Enter your name: ")
    if location is None:
        location = raw_input("Enter your location: ")
    print "Name: %s | Location: %s" % (name, location)