Some built-in to pad a list in python

Question

I have a list of size < N and I want to pad it up to the size N with a value.

Certainly, I can use something like the following, but I feel that there sh

Answer 1

gnibbler's answer is nicer, but if you need a builtin, you could use itertools.izip_longest (zip_longest in Py3k):

itertools.izip_longest( xrange( N ), list )

which will return a list of tuples ( i, list[ i ] ) filled-in to None. If you need to get rid of the counter, do something like:

map( itertools.itemgetter( 1 ), itertools.izip_longest( xrange( N ), list ) )