Pythonic way to pass keyword arguments on conditional

Question

Is there a more pythonic way to do this?

if authenticate:
    connect(username="foo")
else:
    connect(username="foo", password="bar", otherarg="zed")

Answer 1

1. You could add them to a list of kwargs like this:

   connect_kwargs = dict(username="foo")
   if authenticate:
      connect_kwargs['password'] = "bar"
      connect_kwargs['otherarg'] = "zed"
   connect(**connect_kwargs)
   

   This can sometimes be helpful when you have a complicated set of options that can be passed to a function. In this simple case, I think what you have is better, but this could be considered more pythonic because it doesn't repeat username="foo" twice like the OP.

2. This alternative approach can also be used, although it only works if you know what the default arguments are. I also wouldn't consider it to be very "pythonic" because of the duplicated if clauses.

   password = "bar" if authenticate else None
   otherarg = "zed" if authenticate else None
   connect(username="foo", password=password, otherarg=otherarg)