Passing a parameter to the decorator in python

Question

Why is this decorator with a parameter not working?

def decAny( f0 ):
    def wrapper( s0 ):
        return \"<%s> %s \" % ( any, f0(), any          


        

Answer 1

Decorators are functions that return functions. When "passing a parameter to the decorator" what you are actually doing is calling a function that returns a decorator. So decAny() should be a function that returns a function that returns a function.

It would look something like this:

import functools

def decAny(tag):
    def dec(f0):
        @functools.wraps(f0)
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            return "<%s> %s </%s>" % (tag, f0(*args, **kwargs), tag)
        return wrapper
    return dec

@decAny( 'xxx' )
def test2():
    return 'test1XML'

Example:

>>> print(test2())
<xxx> test1XML </xxx>

Note that in addition to fixing the specific problem you were hitting I also improved your code a bit by adding *args and **kwargs as arguments to the wrapped function and passing them on to the f0 call inside of the decorator. This makes it so you can decorate a function that accepts any number of positional or named arguments and it will still work correctly.

You can read up about functools.wraps() here:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/functools.html#functools.wraps

Answer 2

There is a good sample from "Mark Lutz - Learning Python" book:

def timer(label=''):
    def decorator(func):
        def onCall(*args):   # Multilevel state retention:
            ...              # args passed to function
            func(*args)      # func retained in enclosing scope
            print(label, ... # label retained in enclosing scope
        return onCall
    return decorator         # Returns the actual decorator

@timer('==>')                # Like listcomp = timer('==>')(listcomp)
def listcomp(N): ...         # listcomp is rebound to new onCall

listcomp(...)                # Really calls onCall