On Dec 18, 12:49 pm, ram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Here's a little issue I run into more than I like: I often need to
> unpack a sequence that may be too short or too long into a fixed-size
> set of items:
>
> a, b, c = seq # when seq = (1, 2, 3, 4, ...) or seq = (1, 2)
>
> What I usually do is something like this:
>
> a, b, c = (list(seq) + [None, None, None])[:3]
>
> but that just feels rather ugly to me -- is there a good Pythonic
> idiom for this?
In terms of brevity I don't think so; however it can be done more
efficient and general (e.g. for infinite series) using itertools:
from itertools import islice, chain, repeat
def unpack(iterable, n, default=None):
return islice(chain(iterable,repeat(default)), n)
a, b, c = unpack(seq, 3)
George
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