Efficient way to break up a list into two pieces

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:55 PM, marwie <marwie at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I recently read about augmented assignments and that (with l1, l2
> being lists)
>
>    l1.extend(l2)
>
> is more efficient than
>
>    l1 = l1 + l2
>
> because unnecessary copy operations can be avoided. Now my question is
> if there's a similar thing for breaking a list into two parts. Let's
> say I want to remove from l1 everything from and including position 10
> and store it in l2. Then I can write
>
>    l2 = l1[10:]
>    del l1[10:]
>
> But since I'm assigning a slice the elements will be copied.
> Basically, I'm looking for something like l1.pop(10,len(l1)) which
> returns and removes a whole chunk of data. Is there such a thing (and
> if not, why not?)
>

The idiom is:

>>> l1, l2 = l1[:10], l1[10:]

Don't know if it's optimized or not. If it's not, it could probably
be. This is a really common idiom.

-- 
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner at jonathangardner.net