python's ".format" function

Question

Recently, I found ''.format function very useful because it can improve readability a lot comparing to the % formatting. Trying to achieve simple string formatting:

data = {'year':2012, 'month':'april', 'location': 'q2dm1'}

year = 2012
month = 'april'
location = 'q2dm1'
a = "year: {year}, month: {month}, location: {location}"
print a.format(data)
print a.format(year=year, month=month, location=location)
print a.format(year, month, location)

Whilst two first prints do format as I expect (yes, something=something looks ugly, but that's an example only), the last one would raise KeyError: 'year'. Is there any trick in python to create dictionary so it will automatically fill keys and values, for example somefunc(year, month, location) will output {'year':year, 'month': month, 'location': location}?

I'm pretty new to python and couldn't find any info on this topic, however a trick like this would improve and shrink my current code drastically.

Thanks in advance and pardon my English.

Answer 1

The first print should be

print a.format(**data)

Also, if you are finding some shortcuts, you could write one like, no big difference.

def trans(year, month, location):
    return dict(year=year, month=month, location=location)