Question

Is it possible to iterate a list in the following way in Python (treat this code as pseudocode)?

a = [5, 7, 11, 4, 5]
for v, w in a:
    print [v, w]

And it should produce

[5, 7]
[7, 11]
[11, 4]
[4, 5]

Answer 1

From the itertools recipes:

from itertools import tee

def pairwise(iterable):
    "s -> (s0,s1), (s1,s2), (s2, s3), ..."
    a, b = tee(iterable)
    next(b, None)
    return zip(a, b)

for v, w in pairwise(a):
    ...