Question

I’m writing a pretty simple function for use in my Django project to display a number of pages only if the application is in debug mode. In AS3, you can essentially apply a methods parameters to another methods using that method’s call or apply method. Let me demonstrate:

public function secureCall(...arguments):void {
    if (SECURE == true) {
        // reference the 'call' method below
        call.apply(this, arguments);
    } else {
        throw new IllegalAccessError();
    }
}

public function call(a:String, b:int, ...others):void {
    // do something important
} 

Is there a way to do this in Python? I essentially want to do the following:

from django.views.generic.simple import direct_to_template

def dto_debug(...args):
    if myapp.settings.DEBUG:
        direct_to_tempate.apply(args)
    else:
        raise Http404

Answer 1

When defining a function, you can use this notation:

def takes_any_args(*args, **kwargs):
    pass

args will be a tuple of positional arguments,
kwargs a dict of keyword arguments

You can then call another function with these arguments like this:

some_function(*args, **kwargs)

You can omit either of the *args or **kwargs if you don’t want to pass positional or keyword arguments, respectively. You can of course create the tuple/dict yourself, they don’t have to come from a def statement.