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

more-itertools is a library that includes a special padded tool for this kind of problem:

import more_itertools as mit

list(mit.padded(a, "", N))
# [1, '', '', '', '']

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Alternatively, more_itertools also implements Python itertools recipes including padnone and take as mentioned by @kennytm, so they don't have to be reimplemented:

list(mit.take(N, mit.padnone(a)))
# [1, None, None, None, None]

If you wish to replace the default None padding, use a list comprehension:

["" if i is None else i for i in mit.take(N, mit.padnone(a))]
# [1, '', '', '', '']