What’s the difference between *args and kwargs in Python?

Hello Arushi, really nice question.

Both *args and **kwargs let a function take a flexible number of arguments, but they work in different ways.

*args collects positional arguments. These are the values you pass without naming them:

def demo(*args):
    print(args)

demo(1, 2, 3)
# (1, 2, 3)

So args turns into a tuple of whatever positional values you give.

**kwargs collects keyword arguments — the ones you pass using names:

def demo(**kwargs):
    print(kwargs)

demo(name="Arushi", age=20)
# {'name': 'Arushi', 'age': 20}

This becomes a dictionary where the keys are the argument names.

The simple way to remember it:

• *args → any number of unnamed values

• **kwargs → any number of named values

They’re both handy when you don’t know ahead of time how many arguments someone will pass into your function.

If you have further questions, I'm here to help.