Question

In Python 3 I can do the following (see also PEP3132 on Extended Iterable Unpacking):

a, *b = (1, 2, 3)
# a = 1; b = (2, 3)

What can I do to achieve the same similarly elegant in Python 2.x?

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I know that I could use single element access and slicing operations, but I wonder if there is a more pythonic way. My code so far:

a, b = (1, 2, 3)[0], (1, 2, 3)[1:]
# a = 1; b = (2, 3)

Answer 1

I found out that the related PEP3132 gives some examples for Python 2.x as well:

Many algorithms require splitting a sequence in a "first, rest" pair:

first, rest = seq[0], seq[1:]

[…]

Also, if the right-hand value is not a list, but an iterable, it has to be converted to a list before being able to do slicing; to avoid creating this temporary list, one has to resort to

it = iter(seq)
first = it.next()
rest = list(it)

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Other approaches given in the answers to this question:

Function Argument List Unpacking Approach

requires an extra function definition/call:

def unpack(first, *rest): 
  return first, rest
first, rest = unpack( *seq )

I wonder why it is implemented in unpacking function argument lists but not for normal tuple unpacking.

Generator Approach

Credits. Also requires a custom function implementation. Is a little more flexible concerning the number of first variables.

def unpack_nfirst(seq, nfirst):
  it = iter(seq)
  for x in xrange(nfirst):
    yield next(it, None)
  yield tuple(it)
first, rest = unpack_nfirst(seq, 1)

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The most pythonic would probably be the ones mentioned in the PEP above, I guess?