Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

Variable argument lists

Default values alone do not allow us all the flexible benefits of method overloading. One thing that makes Python really slick is the ability to write methods that accept an arbitrary number of positional or keyword arguments without explicitly naming them. We can also pass arbitrary lists and dictionaries into such functions.

For example, a function to accept a link or list of links and download the web pages could use such variadic arguments, or varargs. Instead of accepting a single value that is expected to be a list of links, we can accept an arbitrary number of arguments, where each argument is a different link. We do this by specifying the * operator in the function definition, as follows:

def get_pages(*links): ...