Dumb elisp question

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I've made a function that takes as arguments an arbitrary format string
and a list of arguments to that string. The list of arguments is of
varying length, and the args need to be mapped through a function before
they're passed to the format string. So in the bowels of the function
there's something like:

(format fmt-str-var (mapcar (lambda (arg) (do-thing-with arg))
list-of-arguments))

Obviously, the problem is that mapcar returns a single list of strings,
not the series of atomic strings that format requires.

I've tried to solve this problem many different ways, including turning
this into a macro and using ",@", and using ",@" even when it's not a
macro, and looking at other mapping functions, and trying to make some
sort of "splice" function of my own, and… and…

Nothing works quite right. This can't be a macro because elsewhere it
needs to pass `commandp'. I can't make any of the other fixes work
properly.

Can anyone provide an elegant solution?

Thanks,
Eric



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GNU Emacs 23.2.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.4)
 of 2011-04-04 on rothera, modified by Debian