What's your preferred way of processing configuration parameters?
For example:
test(this=7)
could be processed by:
def test(**kw):
this = kw.pop('this', 1)
that = kw.pop('that', 2)
or
def test(**kw):
if 'this' in kw:
this = kw['this']
else:
this = 1
if 'that' in kw:
that = kw['that']
else:
that = 2
Is there a better (more pythonic) way?
If the possible parameters and defaults are fixed, the Pythonic way is to write:
def test(this=1, that=2):
...
If the parameter list is dynamic, your approach with kwds.pop() has a nice advantage of letting you verify that all the arguments were used (detecting misspelled parameter names for example). It is instructive to look at a fragment from the code generated by collections.namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y'], verbose=True). Notice the final check to make sure all arguments were consumed from kwds:
def _replace(_self, **kwds):
'Return a new Point object replacing specified fields with new values'
result = _self._make(map(kwds.pop, ('x', 'y'), _self))
if kwds:
raise ValueError('Got unexpected field names: %r' % kwds.keys())
return result
I personally like to loop through the key/value pair's like so:
def test(**kw):
for k, v in kw.items():
if k == 'this':
something = v
# etc...
def test(this=1, that=2):?