How to use the values of a list that is inside another list as arguments of a function in Python

Question

I am very new to Python. I have a function DISTANCE(lat1, long1, lat2, long2) that calculates the distance between 2 points.

Then I have a list called POINTS, where each value is another list which contains those four values.

I would like to obtain the sum of the results of the function DISTANCE for all the values inside POINTS.

Can anybody help me with that? Thanks!

Answer 1

sum(DISTANCE(*p) for p in POINTS)

The * here is the syntax for Unpacking Argument Lists, also called the splat operator. This passes the contents of an iterable as the positional arguments to a function, so if p were [1, 2, 3, 4], DISTANCE(*p) would be the same as DISTANCE(1, 2, 3, 4).