Is there a shorthand syntax for a sequence of throwaway variables?

Question

Let\'s say you have a situation like this:

_, _, _, substring_1, _, substring_2 = some_string.split(\',\')

Is there a shorthand way of expressi

Answer 1

Not a syntactic shortcut, but you might want to use the itemgetter function from the operator module:

from operator import itemgetter
my_pair = itemgetter(3, 5)
substring_1, substring_2 = my_pair(some_string.split(','))

Or, define my_pair to wrap the call to split as well:

def my_pair(x):
    return itemgetter(3,5)(x.split(','))

substring_1, substring_2 = my_pair(some_string)