Why is there an underscore following the "from" in the Twilio Rest API?

Question

In the twilio python library, we have this feature to create messages:

from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient

and we can write:

msg = TwilioRestClient.messages.create(body=myMsgString, from_=myNumber, to=yourNumber)

My question is simple: why does an underscore follow the from parameter? Or why is that the parameter name? Is it because from is otherwise a keyword in Python and we differentiate variables from keywords with an underscore suffix? Is that actually necessary in this case?

Answer 1

This is because from would be an invalid argument name, resulting in a SyntaxError - it's a python keyword.

Appending a trailing underscore is the recommended way to avoid such conflicts mentioned in the PEP8 style guide:

If a function argument's name clashes with a reserved keyword, it is generally better to append a single trailing underscore rather than use an abbreviation or spelling corruption.