Question

Is there a way to cast argument list into list?

Somthing like:

list(*arguments)

Dosen’t work because list() take at most 1 argument…

im trying to cast tuple of tuples into a list

list(('a', *('b', 5)) 

dosent work at all…

Answer 1

For a tuple of tuples, eg,

a = ((1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6))

Getting it into a list depends on what list you are expecting – you can pass the tuple straight into list (it takes any iterable) to get a list of tuples:

>>> list(a)
[(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)]

If instead you want a flattened list, you want itertools.chain – it gives you a generator, but you can pass that into list to get a list:

>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(a))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

If you want a list of lists, you want a list comprehension:

>>> [list(b) for b in a]
[[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]]

To flatten a heterogenous tuple of tuples and single values, it gets a little more complicated – what you want to do is turn all the single values into single-length tuples or lists, and then it’s the same as the chain example above. If you only want to flatten the tuples, and not, eg, nested lists, you could do this:

>>> a = ('a', ('b', 'c'))
>>> list(itertools.chain.from_iterable(b if isinstance(b, tuple) else [b] for b in a))
['a', 'b', 'c']