What does the brackets with comma around input arguments mean in python documentations?

Question

What does the brackets around input arguments mean?

Consider this example:

cv.boxPoints(box[,points]) example doc link

What confuses me the most is the comma inside the bracket of the second input argument points. Why is it represented as [,points]. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 16 '21 at 04:49

5

It's a common convention in documentation to denote optional arguments with square brackets. That documentation is telling you that the second argument to boxPoints is optional. It has no syntactic meaning in Python; you can call the function with one or two arguments like normal.

answered Apr 16 '21 at 04:49

Silvio Mayolo

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Thanks for the response! any reason for the representing the args as `[,points]` instead of `,[points]` – Mahesh Apr 16 '21 at 04:54
2

@Mahesh Because if you don’t pass the `points` argument, you also don’t need to add the `,`. – deceze Apr 16 '21 at 05:12
hahaha wunderbar! makes most sense now. – Mahesh Apr 16 '21 at 15:55

What does the brackets with comma around input arguments mean in python documentations?

1 Answers1