Is there any nice way to unpack a list of unknown size??

[Grant Edwards]

On 2008-09-14, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:

>> 1. first, second, third, *rest = foo
>> 
>>  2. for (a,b,c,*rest) in list_of_lists:
>
> update to Python 3.0 (as others have pointed out), or just do
>
>      first, second, third = foo[:3]
>      rest = foo[3:]

Of course you can do that in one line if you want it to look a
bit more like the original pseudocode:

     (a,b,c),rest = foo[:3],foo[3:]

That still requires you to manually count the number of
"non-rest" destination elements on the LHS and type that number
twice on the RHS.  If you wanted to elminate a tiny bit of the
redundancy you could define a split() function:

    def split(seq,n):
        return seq[:n],seq[n:]

    (a,b,c),rest = split(foo,3)
     
-- 
Grant