8.4. Extra positional arguments

You can declare your function in such a way that it will accept any number of positional parameters. To do this, use an argument of the form “*name” in your argument list.

If you use this special argument, it must follow all the positional and keyword arguments in the list.
When the function is called, this name will be bound to a tuple containing any positional parameters that the caller supplied, over and above parameters that corresponded to other parameters.

Here is an example of such a function.

>>> def h(i, j=99, *extras):
...     print i, j, extras
... 
>>> h(0)
0 99 ()
>>> h(1,2)
1 2 ()
>>> h(3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
3 4 (5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
>>>

A Python 2.7 programming tutorial

8.4. Extra positional arguments