Pass arbitrary number of a set of variables to Python Function

Question

I am not sure on the precise way to phrase the question as it is easier to just demonstrate with code. I would like to have a function that accepts a variable number of a set of 3 required and 1 optional arguments. As an illustration, matplotlib.pyplot.plot() can accept any number of (x, y, color) set of variables. I would like to copy this behavior, but I am unsure of the proper way to do this using *args or similar. Below I illustrate the behavior I would like.

myFunc(name, lo, hi, step) # Do something
myFunc(name, lo, hi, step, name2, low2, hi2, step2) # Do something for name and name2
myFunc(name, lo, hi, name2, low2, hi2) # Same as above but use default step for both

The only way I can think of is to loop through the arguments and perform a series of checks on make sure it satisfies the type for (name, lo, hi, step) and to check if step is even given, but I would like to know if there is a more efficient way of doing this.

Edit:

I wanted the above behavior since my function uses the first set to identify a parameter and create a while loop. If any more sets of parameters remain it calls itself recursively to construct a nested while loop with the remaining parameters, etc. If no additional sets remain it will perform some data measurement and then return. This way I can loop through an arbitrarily large multi-dimensional space using a single recursive function.

Answer 1

Is something like this what you're looking for?

list_of_things = [('name', 'lo', 'hi', 'step'),
                  ('name2', 'lo2', 'hi2'), 
                  ('name3', 'lo3', 'hi3', 'step3')
]
def myFunc(name, lo, hi, step='default'):
                              # do something
def callMyFunc(x):    
    for i in x:
        myFunc(*i)            # pass the contents of the tuple as arguments

If you don't want the tuple of items ordered, you would have to name each of the arguments and submit them named.