Rotating a two-dimensional array in Python

Question

In a program I\'m writing the need to rotate a two-dimensional array came up. Searching for the optimal solution I found this impressive one-liner that does the job:

Answer 1

There are three parts to this:

1. original[::-1] reverses the original array. This notation is Python list slicing. This gives you a "sublist" of the original list described by [start:end:step], start is the first element, end is the last element to be used in the sublist. step says take every step'th element from first to last. Omitted start and end means the slice will be the entire list, and the negative step means that you'll get the elements in reverse. So, for example, if original was [x,y,z], the result would be [z,y,x]
2. The * when preceding a list/tuple in the argument list of a function call means "expand" the list/tuple so that each of its elements becomes a separate argument to the function, rather than the list/tuple itself. So that if, say, args = [1,2,3], then zip(args) is the same as zip([1,2,3]), but zip(*args) is the same as zip(1,2,3).
3. zip is a function that takes n arguments each of which is of length m and produces a list of length m, the elements of are of length n and contain the corresponding elements of each of the original lists. E.g., zip([1,2],[a,b],[x,y]) is [[1,a,x],[2,b,y]]. See also Python documentation.