split list into 2 lists corresponding to every other element

Question

I know there are many chunky ways to do this, but I am looking for a slick pythonic way to accomplish the following. Given a list of numbers:

a = [0,1,2,3,4,         


        

Answer 1

You can do that using list slicing:

b = a[::2]
c = a[1::2]

Example

>>> a = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

>>> b = a[::2]
>>> c = a[1::2]

>>> print b
[0,2,4,6,8]

>>> print c
[1,3,5,7,9]

The [::] syntax is as follows: [start:end:step]. If you don't specify any parameters for start and end, it will work with the whole list. Therefore, what the code above is doing is:

For b: start at index 0, take every other element from a
For c: start at index 1, take every other element from a