Is there a builtin identity function in python?

Question

I\'d like to point to a function that does nothing:

def identity(*args)
    return args

my use case is something like this

Answer 1

Doing some more research, there is none, a feature was asked in issue 1673203 And from Raymond Hettinger said there won't be:

Better to let people write their own trivial pass-throughs and think about the signature and time costs.

So a better way to do it is actually (a lambda avoids naming the function):

_ = lambda *args: args

• advantage: takes any number of parameters
• disadvantage: the result is a boxed version of the parameters

OR

_ = lambda x: x

• advantage: doesn't change the type of the parameter
• disadvantage: takes exactly 1 positional parameter