On Wednesday 26 December 2007 10:03, Alan Gauld wrote: > I thought I was following this but now I'm not sure. > > Do you mean that if I have a list L that contains an arbitrary > > number of sublists that I can call zip using: > >>> zip(*L) > > rather than > > >>> zip(L[0],L[1],...., L[n]) > > If so I agree. > Yes. You could build up a string and call eval(), but otherwise this wouldn't be possible, without iterating through manually. (using evail() is usually not a good idea, avoid it if you can)
> But any time that you use the *[] format it is easier to > just put the content of the [] into the zip directly, which is what, > I think, Kent is saying? > Yes, for the original example, zip(a,b) is equivalent, and probably clearer. Certainly simpler. Sorry to be confusing. I realize now that lots of my code have lists of known length and need a little tweaking :) I just remembered another way to do this, with map(): >>> a=range(4) >>> b=['a','b','c','d'] >>> map(None,a,b) [(0, 'a'), (1, 'b'), (2, 'c'), (3, 'd')] This also doesn't complain if the lists are uneven, but instead of truncating, it pads the short ones with None's. I almost never use map() now that we have list comprehensions, however. map(None, *(a,b)) also works if you are "transposing" an unknown number of lists. Cheers _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
