Flatten a list/tuple and Call a function with tuples

[beginner]

On Jul 25, 11:33 am, Paul Rubin <http://phr...@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:
> beginner <zyzhu2... at gmail.com> writes:
> > I know the * operator. However, a 'partial unpack' does not seem to work.
>
> A few other posters have mentioned ways around this, but you might ask
> yourself what coding situation makes you want to do this stuff in the
> first place.  I won't say there's never a reason for it, but a lot of
> times, a list containing a mixture of scalars and lists/tuples is a
> sign that your underlying data representation is contorted.  Things
> are logically single values or they are logically lists of values, and
> that mixed representation is often a sign that the item logically
> should be a list, and you're hairing up the program with special
> treatment of the case where the list has exactly one element.
>
> I.e. instead of [[1,2,], 3, [5,6,]] maybe you really want
> [[1,2,], [3,], [5,6]] without the special treatment and flattening.

Very good question. It is well possible that the problem is my
programming style. I am new to python and am still developing a style
that works for me. A lot of things that work in perl does not seem to
work. Unpacking and flattening are just two examples.

I need nested lists to represent nested records in a script. Since the
structure of the underlying data is nested, I think it is probably
reasonable to represent them as nested lists. For example, if I have
the below structure:

Big Record
   Small Record Type A
   Many Small Record Type B
   Small Record Type C

It is pretty natural to use lists, although after a while it is
difficult to figure out the meaning of the fields in the lists. If
only there were a way to 'attach' names to members of the list.

For the unpacking question, I encountered it when working with list
comprehensions. For example:

[ f(*x,1,2) for x in list] is difficult to do if I don't want to
expand *x to x[0]..x[n]. There are usually 7-10 items in the list and
it is very tedious and error prone.

The second problem is from a nested list comprehension. I just needed
something to flatten the list at the moment.

I am still forming my way to do things in python via trial and error.
It is well possible that this is not the natural way to do things.