Is there a middle ground between `zip` and `zip_longest`

Question

Say I have these three lists:

a = [1, 2, 3, 4]
b = [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
c = [10, 11, 12]

Is there a builtin function such that:

Answer 1

import itertools as it

somezip = lambda *x: it.islice(it.izip_longest(*x), len(x[0]))



>>> list(somezip(a,b))
[(1, 5), (2, 6), (3, 7), (4, 8)]

>>> list(somezip(a,c))
[(1, 10), (2, 11), (3, 12), (4, None)]