RE: [Discuss-gnuradio] Python question

[Tom Rondeau]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: address@hidden [mailto:discuss-
> address@hidden On Behalf Of Dan Halperin
> Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 11:56 PM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] Python question
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I know this isn't really a gnuradio question, but a half-hour on Google
> and browsing the Python site didn't find me the answer. What does ** in
> Python do? Not in the exponent context (2 ** 4 = 16). In particular, I'm
> looking at receive_path.py in the digital examples folder, the following
> code:
> 
>         # Get demod_kwargs
>         demod_kwargs = \
>             self._demod_class.extract_kwargs_from_options(options)
> 
>         ...
> 
>         # receiver
>         self.packet_receiver = \
>             demod_pkts(fg,
>                             self._demod_class(fg, **demod_kwargs),
>                             access_code=None,
>                             callback=self._rx_callback,
>                             threshold=-1)
> 
> Is this some crazy C that SWIG does? Thanks,


Nope, just a fun feature Python provides. It allows you to pass a dictionary
object as the arguments to a function. 

Say we have a function prototype:
def foo(a, b, c):
We normally call this r = foo(<value_a>, <value_b>, <value_c>), but we could
just as easily call this as r = foo(b=<value_b>, c=<value_c>, a=<value_a>).

What we're doing in the receive_path is setting up a dictionary that would
look like (in the above example) di = {"a": <value_a>, "b": <value_b>, "c":
<value_c>} and calling foo as ret = foo(**di).

It allows us to create different modulators that have different arguments
they require. The "self._demod_class.extract_kwargs_from_otpions" formats
the dictionary for the specific modulation class being used, and that's then
passed to the modulator object. Makes for nice, flexible code.

Tom