How does zip(*[iter(s)]*n) work in Python?

Question

s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
n = 3

zip(*[iter(s)]*n) # returns [(1,2,3),(4,5,6),(7,8,9)]

How does zip(*[iter(s)]*n) work? What would it l

Answer 1

One word of advice for using zip this way. It will truncate your list if it's length is not evenly divisible. To work around this you could either use itertools.izip_longest if you can accept fill values. Or you could use something like this:

def n_split(iterable, n):
    num_extra = len(iterable) % n
    zipped = zip(*[iter(iterable)] * n)
    return zipped if not num_extra else zipped + [iterable[-num_extra:], ]

Usage:

for ints in n_split(range(1,12), 3):
    print ', '.join([str(i) for i in ints])

Prints:

1, 2, 3
4, 5, 6
7, 8, 9
10, 11