What does functools.wraps do?

Question

In a comment on this answer to another question, someone said that they weren\'t sure what functools.wraps was doing. So, I\'m asking this question so that ther

Answer 1

1. Prerequisite: You must know how to use decorators and specially with wraps. This comment explains it a bit clear or this link also explains it pretty well.

2. Whenever we use For eg: @wraps followed by our own wrapper function. As per the details given in this link , it says that

functools.wraps is convenience function for invoking update_wrapper() as a function decorator, when defining a wrapper function.

It is equivalent to partial(update_wrapper, wrapped=wrapped, assigned=assigned, updated=updated).

So @wraps decorator actually gives a call to functools.partial(func[,*args][, **keywords]).

The functools.partial() definition says that

The partial() is used for partial function application which “freezes” some portion of a function’s arguments and/or keywords resulting in a new object with a simplified signature. For example, partial() can be used to create a callable that behaves like the int() function where the base argument defaults to two:

>>> from functools import partial
>>> basetwo = partial(int, base=2)
>>> basetwo.__doc__ = 'Convert base 2 string to an int.'
>>> basetwo('10010')
18

Which brings me to the conclusion that, @wraps gives a call to partial() and it passes your wrapper function as a parameter to it. The partial() in the end returns the simplified version i.e the object of what's inside the wrapper function and not the wrapper function itself.