Python "Every Other Element" Idiom
I feel like I spend a lot of time writing code in Python, but not enough time creating Pythonic code. Recently I ran into a funny little problem that I thought might have an easy, idiomatic solution. Paraphrasing the original, I needed to collect every sequential pair in a list. For example, given the list [1,2,3,4,5,6], I wanted to compute [(1,2),(3,4),(5,6)].
I came up with a quick solution at the time that looked like translated Java. Revisiting the question, the best I could do was
l = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
[(l[2*x],l[2*x+1]) for x in range(len(l)/2)]
which has the side effect of tossing out the last number in the case that the length isn't even.
Is there a more idiomatic approach that I'm missing, or is this the best I'm going to get?
Answer
This will do it a bit more neatly:
>>> data = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
>>> zip(data[0::2], data[1::2])
[(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)]
(but it's arguably less readable if you're not familiar with the "stride" feature of ranges).
Like your code, it discards the last value where you have an odd number of values.