How to pass elements of a list as arguments to a function?

I’m building a simple interpreter in python and I’m having trouble handling differing numbers of arguments to my functions. My current method is to get a list of the commands/arguments as follows.

args = str(raw_input('>> ')).split()
com = args.pop(0)

Then to execute com, I check to see if it is in my dictionary of command-> code mappings and if it is I call the function I have stored there. For a command with no arguments, this would look like:

commands[com]()

However, if a command had multiple arguments, I would want this:

commands[com](args[0],args[1])

Is there some trick where I could pass some (or all) of the elements of my arg list to the function that I’m trying to call? Or is there a better way of implementing this without having to use Python’s Cmd class?

Answer

Try unpacking your list into positional arguments:

commands[com](*args)