Python convert args to kwargs

Question

I am writing a decorator that needs to call other functions prior to call of the function that it is decorating. The decorated function may have positional arguments, but the f

Answer 1

Well, this may be overkill. I wrote it for the dectools package (on PyPi), so you can get updates there. It returns the dictionary taking into account positional, keyword, and default arguments. There is a test suite in the package (test_dict_as_called.py):

 def _dict_as_called(function, args, kwargs):
""" return a dict of all the args and kwargs as the keywords they would
be received in a real function call.  It does not call function.
"""

names, args_name, kwargs_name, defaults = inspect.getargspec(function)

# assign basic args
params = {}
if args_name:
    basic_arg_count = len(names)
    params.update(zip(names[:], args))  # zip stops at shorter sequence
    params[args_name] = args[basic_arg_count:]
else:
    params.update(zip(names, args))    

# assign kwargs given
if kwargs_name:
    params[kwargs_name] = {}
    for kw, value in kwargs.iteritems():
        if kw in names:
            params[kw] = value
        else:
            params[kwargs_name][kw] = value
else:
    params.update(kwargs)

# assign defaults
if defaults:
    for pos, value in enumerate(defaults):
        if names[-len(defaults) + pos] not in params:
            params[names[-len(defaults) + pos]] = value

# check we did it correctly.  Each param and only params are set
assert set(params.iterkeys()) == (set(names)|set([args_name])|set([kwargs_name])
                                  )-set([None])

return params