Question

Roughly speaking I am looking for a more elegant alternative for this snippet:

# my_list = range(6) # example list
my_list = ["this", "is", "an", "example", "list"]
max = len(my_list)
for i, elem in enumerate(my_list, start=1):
     if i < max:
         print elem, my_list[i]

which produces:

this is
is an
an example
example list

Is there some builtin for that?

Edit: I should have said, that I took range(6) as a representant for any iterable to avoid confusion. The goal was to iterate over an iterable pairwise pictured by the result above.

Answer 1

I usually do this:

# x = range(6)
x = ["this", "is", "an", "example", "list"]

for prv, nxt in zip(x, x[1:]):
    print prv, nxt