Natural Language Processing with Python

Doing More with Functions

This section discusses more advanced features, which you may prefer to skip on the first time through this chapter.

Functions As Arguments

So far the arguments we have passed into functions have been simple objects, such as strings, or structured objects, such as lists. Python also lets us pass a function as an argument to another function. Now we can abstract out the operation, and apply a different operation on the same data. As the following examples show, we can pass the built-in function len() or a user-defined function last_letter() as arguments to another function:

>>> sent = ['Take', 'care', 'of', 'the', 'sense', ',', 'and', 'the',
...         'sounds', 'will', 'take', 'care', 'of', 'themselves', '.']
>>> def extract_property(prop):
...     return [prop(word) for word in sent]
...
>>> extract_property(len)
[4, 4, 2, 3, 5, 1, 3, 3, 6, 4, 4, 4, 2, 10, 1]
>>> def last_letter(word):
...     return word[-1]
>>> extract_property(last_letter)
['e', 'e', 'f', 'e', 'e', ',', 'd', 'e', 's', 'l', 'e', 'e', 'f', 's', '.']

The objects len and last_letter can be passed around like lists and dictionaries. Notice that parentheses are used after a function name only if we are invoking the function; when we are simply treating the function as an object, these are omitted.

Python provides us with one more way to define functions as arguments to other functions, so-called lambda expressions. Supposing there was no need to use the last_letter() function in multiple places, and thus no need ...