A suitable 'do nothing' lambda expression in python?

Question

I sometimes find myself wanting to make placeholder \'do nothing\' lambda expressions, similar to saying:

def do_nothing(*args):
    pass

B

Answer 1

If you truly want a full do nothing function, make sure to take *args and *kwargs.

noop = lambda *args, **kwargs: None

In all its glorious action

>>> noop = lambda *args, **kwargs: None
>>> noop("yes", duck_size="horse", num_ducks=100)
>>>

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Side Note

Do yourself a favor for the future and include the **kwargs handling. If you ever try to use it somewhere deep away in your code and you forgot that it doesn't take kwargs, it will be quite the Exception to doing nothing:

In [2]: do_nothing('asdf', duck="yes")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
 in ()
----> 1 do_nothing('asdf', duck="yes")

TypeError: () got an unexpected keyword argument 'duck'