Question

Possible Duplicate:
Python: Once and for all. What does the Star operator mean in Python?

x = [1, 2, 3]
y = [4, 5, 6]
zipped = zip(x, y)
list(zipped)

x2, y2 = zip(*zip(x, y))
x == list(x2) and y == list(y2)

What type of object does *zip(x, y) return? Why

res = *zip(x, y)
print(res)

doesn’t work?

Answer 1

The asterisk “operator” in Python does not return an object; it’s a syntactic construction meaning “call the function with the list given as arguments.”

So:

x = [1, 2, 3]
f(*x)

is equivalent to:

f(1, 2, 3)

Blog entry on this (not mine): http://www.technovelty.org/code/python/asterisk.html