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Python doesn’t stop at allowing us to accept unlimited positional arguments; it also gives us the power to define functions with unlimited keyword arguments. The syntax is very similar but uses two asterisks ** instead of one. We typically call these kwargs as a shorthand for keyword arguments.

Let’s examine a function that prints out some useful information about kwargs to see it in action:

def arbitrary_keyword_args(**kwargs):
  print(type(kwargs))
  print(kwargs)
  # See if there's an 'anything_goes' keyword arg and print it
  print(kwargs.get('anything_goes'))

arbitrary_keyword_args(this_arg='wowzers', anything_goes=101)

Would output:

<class 'dict'>
{'this_arg': 'wowzers', 'anything_goes': 101}
101

We can observe two things:

**kwargs takes the form of a dictionary with all the keyword argument values passed to arbitrary_keyword_args. Since **kwargs is a dictionary, we can use standard dictionary functions like .get() to retrieve values.
Just as we saw with *args, the name of kwargs is completely arbitrary, and this example works exactly the same with the name becoming data:
```
def arbitrary_keyword_args(**data):
  # ...
```

Let’s practice using **kwargs to get a feel of how it works in a function!

Instructions

Jiho is pleased with how we can store orders for our tables. However, the staff now wants to distinguish between food items and drinks.

Since food items get prepared in the kitchen and drinks are prepared at the bar, it’s important to distinguish between the two in our application.

The tables dictionary has been changed to support the staff’s requests. Take some time to examine the changed structure.

Run the code to move on to the next checkpoint!

Since our program now requires a distinction between food items and drinks, this is a great place to utilize the power of **kwargs.

Define a function called assign_food_items() that has one parameter, order_items. Pair this parameter with a ** operator to handle any keyword arguments.

For now, just have the function print order_items.

Now we want to capture the food items and drinks in order_items. Use the .get() method to do the following:

Capture the values from a keyword argument called food and assign it to a variable called food
Capture the values from a keyword argument called drinks and assign it to a variable called drinks

Refer to the commented example call at the bottom of the script for a reference on how we will call this function later on.

Lastly, inside of our function use print() to output the food variable and another print() to output the drinks variable.

Uncomment the example call provided to test our function!

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