Question

I have a dictionary, and I want to use the items (key,value) to generate a single string, which I will pass argument to another script on the command line.

Snippet illustrates further:

args = { 'arg1': 100, 'arg2': 234 }

I want to create the string:

--arg1=100 --arg2=234

from the dictionary.

The naive (expensive) way to do that would be to loop through the items in the dictionary, building the string as I went along.

Is there a more pythonic way of doing this?

Answer 1

You need a loop, but you can do it concisely:

" ".join("--%s=%s" % item for item in args.iteritems())

(for Python 2. For Python 3, change iteritems to items)