Packing list elements into tuples

[Steven Bethard]

Nickolay Kolev <nmkolev <at> uni-bonn.de> writes:
> l = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
> 
> tups = [(1,2,3), (4,5,6)]

My favorite idiom:

>>> l = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
>>> zip(*(iter(l),)*3)
[(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6)]
>>> l = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] 
>>> zip(*(iter(l),)*3)
[(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6), (7, 8, 9)]

If you want dicts, try:

>>> l = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
>>> tuples = zip(*(iter(l),)*3)
>>> labels = 'first second third'.split()
>>> [dict(zip(labels, t)) for t in tuples]
[{'second': 2, 'third': 3, 'first': 1}, {'second': 5, 'third': 6, 'first': 4}]

Basically, you can make a dict with whatever labels you want by zipping your
labels with the appropriate tuples and calling the dict builtin.

Steve