> unzip doesn't seem to work for me... It's not a part of the standard Python distribution, but this is a naive implementation (it doesn't react well to the list's contents having different lengths).
def unzip(seq): result = [[] for i in range(len(seq[0]))] for item in seq: for index in range(len(item)): result[index].append(item[index]) return result >>> unzip(zip(range(5), 'abcde')) [[0, 1, 2, 3, 4], ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e']] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list