Bare asterisk in function arguments?

Question

What does a bare asterisk in the arguments of a function do?

When I looked at the pickle module, I see this:

pickle.dump(obj, file, protocol=None, *,         


        

Answer 1

I've found the following link to be very helpful explaining *, *args and **kwargs:

https://pythontips.com/2013/08/04/args-and-kwargs-in-python-explained/

Essentially, in addition to the answers above, I've learned from the site above (credit: https://pythontips.com/author/yasoob008/) the following:

With the demonstration function defined first below, there are two examples, one with *args and one with **kwargs

def test_args_kwargs(arg1, arg2, arg3):
    print "arg1:", arg1
    print "arg2:", arg2
    print "arg3:", arg3

# first with *args
>>> args = ("two", 3,5)
>>> test_args_kwargs(*args)
arg1: two
arg2: 3
arg3: 5

# now with **kwargs:
>>> kwargs = {"arg3": 3, "arg2": "two","arg1":5}
>>> test_args_kwargs(**kwargs)
arg1: 5
arg2: two
arg3: 3

So *args allows you to dynamically build a list of arguments that will be taken in the order in which they are fed, whereas **kwargs can enable the passing of NAMED arguments, and can be processed by NAME accordingly (irrespective of the order in which they are fed).

The site continues, noting that the correct ordering of arguments should be:

some_func(fargs,*args,**kwargs)