I'm not sure I understand the use case for reversing the formatting variables, but you could do this to make old-style formatting work that way: >>> 'hell

I'm not sure I understand the use case for reversing the formatting variables, but you could do this to make old-style formatting work that way: >>> 'hello, %s %s' % tuple(reversed(['smith', 'bob'])) 'hello, bob smith' I think it's more readable if you abstract that bit into a lambda function: >>> rev_args = lambda *args: tuple(reversed(args)) >>> 'hello, %s %s' % rev_args('smith', 'bob') 'hello, bob smith'