2 PEP 309: Partial Function Application

The functools module is intended to contain tools for functional-style programming.

One useful tool in this module is the partial() function. For programs written in a functional style, you'll sometimes want to construct variants of existing functions that have some of the parameters filled in. Consider a Python function f(a, b, c); you could create a new function g(b, c) that was equivalent to f(1, b, c). This is called ``partial function application''.

partial takes the arguments

(function, arg1, arg2, ...
kwarg1=value1, kwarg2=value2)

. The resulting object is callable, so you can just call it to invoke function with the filled-in arguments.

import functools

def log (message, subsystem):
    "Write the contents of 'message' to the specified subsystem."
    print '%s: %s' % (subsystem, message)
    ...

server_log = functools.partial(log, subsystem='server')
server_log('Unable to open socket')

Here's another example, from a program that uses PyGTK. Here a context-sensitive pop-up menu is being constructed dynamically. The callback provided for the menu option is a partially applied version of the open_item() method, where the first argument has been provided.

...
class Application:
    def open_item(self, path):
       ...
    def init (self):
        open_func = functools.partial(self.open_item, item_path)
        popup_menu.append( ("Open", open_func, 1) )

Another function in the functools module is the update_wrapper(wrapper, wrapped) function that helps you write well-behaved decorators. update_wrapper() copies the name, module, and docstring attribute to a wrapper function so that tracebacks inside the wrapped function are easier to understand. For example, you might write:

def my_decorator(f):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwds):
        print 'Calling decorated function'
        return f(*args, **kwds)
    functools.update_wrapper(wrapper, f)
    return wrapper

wraps() is a decorator that can be used inside your own decorators to copy the wrapped function's information. An alternate version of the previous example would be:

def my_decorator(f):
    @functools.wraps(f)
    def wrapper(*args, **kwds):
        print 'Calling decorated function'
        return f(*args, **kwds)
    return wrapper