Question

im trying to access my decorators arguments inside the wrapper function with no luck.

what i have is:

def my_decorator(arg1=False, arg2=None):

    def decorator(method):
        @functools.wraps(method)
        def wrapper(method, *args, **kwargs):
            # do something based on arg1 and arg2
            # accessing one of the two named arguments
            # ends up in a 'referenced before assignment'

            arg1 = arg1 # error
            arg2 = arg2 # error

            newarg1 = arg1 # working
            newarg2 = arg2 # working

            return method(*args, **kwargs)
        return wrapper
    return decorator

and i would use it like a normal decorator

@my_decorator(arg1=True, arg2='a sting or whatever else')
the_function()

i really don’t understand why i can’t access the decorators arguments.

Answer 1

You can access arg1 and arg2, but you should not assign to these names, not even with “augmented” assign operators, because this would make them local variables in the inner function. The error message you get shows that you tried to do exactly this (though you did not show your code).

In Python 3, you can work around this problem using

nonlocal arg1, arg2

somewhere in wrapper().