Is there a way to store a function in a list or dictionary so that when the index (or key) is called it fires off the stored function?

Question

For instance, I've tried things like mydict = {'funcList1': [foo(),bar(),goo()], 'funcList2': [foo(),goo(),bar()], which doesn't work.

Is there some kind of structure with this kind of functionality?

I realize that I could obviously do this just as easily with a bunch of def statements:

def func1():
    foo()
    bar()
    goo()

But the number of statements I need is getting pretty unwieldy and tough to remember. It would be nice to wrap them nicely in a dictionary that I could examine the keys of now and again.

Answer 1

Functions are first class objects in Python and so you can dispatch using a dictionary. For example, if foo and bar are functions, and dispatcher is a dictionary like so.

dispatcher = {'foo': foo, 'bar': bar}

Note that the values are foo and bar which are the function objects, and NOT foo() and bar().

To call foo, you can just do dispatcher['foo']()

EDIT: If you want to run multiple functions stored in a list, you can possibly do something like this.

dispatcher = {'foobar': [foo, bar], 'bazcat': [baz, cat]}

def fire_all(func_list):
    for f in func_list:
        f()

fire_all(dispatcher['foobar'])