Python Essentials

Defining optional parameters via default values

Python lets us provide a default value for a parameter. Parameters with default values are optional. The standard library is full of functions with optional parameters. One example is the int() function. We can use int("48897") to convert a string to an integer, assuming that the string represents a number in base 10. We can use int("48897", 16) to explicitly state that the string should be treated as a hexadecimal value. The default value for the base parameter is 10.

Remember that we can use keyword arguments for a function. This means that we might want to write something like this: int("48897", base=16), to make it abundantly clear what the second argument to the int() function is being used for. ...