Normally, Python doesn't preserve the order of keyword arguments passed to a function. That’s because it uses a dictionary to pass the arguments, and Python’s dictionary doesn’t remember the order in which elements are added.

That’s a problem in certain situations. For instance, if you want to define data models for serialization:

def define_record(record_name, **fields) :
    print "record: %s" % (record_name,)
    print "fields: %s" % (fields.items(),)

define_record("Point", x="Int32", y="Int32")

This is the output you get:

record: Point
fields: [('y', 'Int32'), ('x', 'Int32')]

As you can see, the order of the fields is wrong.

The orderedkwargs module solves this problem. Add the @orderedkwargs decorator, and you'll receive the keyword arguments as a sequence of (name, value) tuples. Note that keyword arguments are received as var-args, so a single asterisk (*) should be used instead of two.

from orderedkwargs import orderedkwargs

@orderedkwargs
def define_record(record_name, *fields) :
    print "record: %s" % (record_name,)
    print "fields: %s" % (fields,)

define_record("Point", x="Int32", y="Int32")

Now the output is:

record: Point
fields: (('x', 'Int32'), ('y', 'Int32'))

The @orderedkwargs decorator wraps the function in an outer function that inspects the stack, parses the caller's byte code, and finds the order in which the keyword arguments are passed.

Because the orderedkwargs module depends on the internals of the Python VM, it is implementation specific. This particular code has been tested with CPython 2.7 and works only with that version. Also, don't use this in performance sensitive code. It is suitable for one-time tasks such as initialization at startup.