Can someone please explain kwargs?

[Rewritten Ennui]

I keep re-reading the FAQs and tutorials and stuff, but I still don't understand what **kwargs do. Someone please explain them to me in non-technical English

Edit: Why do I always miss a word when typing? D:

[Aleema]

Hmm, as best as I can interpret (don't know what it is officially), it just means "put anything else here". Say you have a definition like this:

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def show_text(time,**kwargs):
    ui.text(time,**kwargs) 

When you called show_text, you'd put things you'd want passed on to ui.text after the variable, like this:

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$ show_text("forty",xpos=3)

Which would mean the function would alter the ui.text to essentially be: ui.text("forty",xpos=3)

I think.

[bink]

[quote="Aleema"]Hmm, as best as I can interpret (don't know what it is officially), it just means "put anything else here"./quote]

That's pretty much it. *args stands for a list of arguments, **kwargs stands for keyword arguments.
So you could do this:

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def testFunction(some_arg,**kwargs):
    print some_arg
    for key in kwargs:
        print kwargs[key]

testFunction("foo",a="bar",b="foo")

The result would be

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foo
bar
foo

You can use this to make the arguments optional. Ren'Py does this to pass arguments for styles through multiple levels of classes.

For the average Ren'Py user, this mostly means that you can put stuff in there like position and style arguments to customize the look of things.

[Rewritten Ennui]

So can it be used to insert different text and images? My head is incapable of comprehending

[Aleema]

Erm, not really? You don't need to worry about it, because it's for optional styling (styling, as in, changing the position, size, color, of things), and if you don't have something that needs to be flexible like that then you probably won't even use it. It's useful for something like Tooltips where you want the tooltip to display in a place as determined instance-by-instance.