passing an argument to avoid a global

[Skaperen]

i still don't understand decorators so i'm looking at DeaD_EyE's 2nd example. suppose the sort key function is a function where i am padding those strings from re.split() that are decimal strings. there needs to be a consistent length of the padding across all records. the code that calls sorted(...,key=) would set up that length in a way that they key function could get it. then it would pad those decimal strings so they all are consistent. is that what the argument is for in line 9? i don't follow what lines 5 and 6 are doing.