Question

I have a list of items (which are HTML table rows, extracted with Beautiful Soup) and I need to iterate over the list and get even and odd elements (I mean index) for each loop run.
My code looks like this:

for top, bottom in izip(table[::2], table[1::2]):
    #do something with top
    #do something else with bottom

How to make this code less ugly? Or maybe is it good way to do this?

EDIT:

table[1::2], table[::2]  => table[::2], table[1::2]

Answer 1

Try:

def alternate(i):
    i = iter(i)
    while True:
        yield(i.next(), i.next())

>>> list(alternate(range(10)))
[(0, 1), (2, 3), (4, 5), (6, 7), (8, 9)]

This solution works on any sequence, not just lists, and doesn’t copy the sequence (it will be far more efficient if you only want the first few elements of a long sequence).