How to convert a list/tuple into an function argument list easily?

[Pierre Rouleau]

I was writing some code that uses the struct module to read and write 
binary data.  With it you can easily define the binary format of a file 
record and read it into a binary string:

 >>> import struct
 >>> fn = 'c:/tmp/1.map'
 >>> fd = open(fn,'rb')
 >>> data = fd.read(8)
 >>> data
'( \xa8\xc0r\x17\x03\x00'
 >>> record = struct.unpack('<LHH',data)
 >>> record
(3232243752L, 6002, 3)

So I end up with record, which is a tuple of 3 elements.  Now if some 
time later in the program, i want to write back the same information in 
another file, the struct.pack() function helps you do that.  But it will 
not accept the tuple as its argument, you must supply each element 
separately.

This fails:

 >>> val = struct.pack('<LHH', record)
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
struct.error: required argument is not an integer

But this works:

 >>> val = struct.pack('<LHH', record[0], record[1], record[2])
 >>>

Question:
=========

is there an easy way to convert a tuple into all of its elements so that 
i could write something like:

	val = struct.pack('<LHH', elementsOf(record))



Thanks!

--

		Pierre