Why use **kwargs in python? What are some real world advantages over using named arguments?

Question

I come from a background in static languages. Can someone explain (ideally through example) the real world advantages of using **kwargs over named arguments?

To me it only seems to make the function call more ambiguous. Thanks.

Answer 1

Real-world examples:

Decorators - they're usually generic, so you can't specify the arguments upfront:

def decorator(old):
    def new(*args, **kwargs):
        # ...
        return old(*args, **kwargs)
    return new

Places where you want to do magic with an unknown number of keyword arguments. Django's ORM does that, e.g.:

Model.objects.filter(foo__lt = 4, bar__iexact = 'bar')