Python 3 allows for a new type of parameter: the keyword-only parameter. We are going to study them only briefly as their use cases are not that frequent. There are two ways of specifying them, either after the variable positional arguments, or after a bare *. Let's see an example of both:

# arguments.keyword.only.py
def kwo(*a, c):
    print(a, c)

kwo(1, 2, 3, c=7)  # prints: (1, 2, 3) 7
kwo(c=4)  # prints: () 4
# kwo(1, 2)  # breaks, invalid syntax, with the following error
# TypeError: kwo() missing 1 required keyword-only argument: 'c'

def kwo2(a, b=42, *, c):
    print(a, b, c)

kwo2(3, b=7, c=99)  # prints: 3 7 99
kwo2(3, c=13)  # prints: 3 42 13
# kwo2(3, 23)  # breaks, invalid syntax, with the following error
# TypeError: kwo2() missing 1 required keyword-only argument: 'c'

As anticipated, the function, kwo, takes a variable number of positional arguments (a) and a keyword-only one, c. The results of the calls are straightforward and you can uncomment the third call to see what error Python returns.

The same applies to the function, kwo2, which differs from kwo in that it takes a positional argument, a, a keyword argument, b, and then a keyword-only one, c. You can uncomment the third call to see the error.

Now that you know how to specify different types of input parameters, let's see how you can combine them in function definitions.