something for itertools

[Daniel Nogradi]

> > In a recent thread,
> > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2006-September/361512.html,
> > a couple of very useful and enlightening itertools examples were given
> > and was wondering if my problem also can be solved in an elegant way
> > by itertools.
> >
> > I have a bunch of tuples with varying lengths and would like to have
> > all of them the length of the maximal and pad with None's. So
> > something like
> >
> > a = ( 1, 2, 3 )
> > b = ( 10, 20 )
> > c = ( 'x', 'y', 'z', 'e', 'f' )
> >
> > should turn into
> >
> > a = ( 1, 2, 3, None, None )
> > b = ( 10, 20, None, None, None )
> > c = ( 'x', 'y', 'z', 'e', 'f' )
> >
>
> or maybe a one liner  :)
>
> >>> (a + 5*(None,))[:5]
> (1, 2, 3, None, None)
>
> >>> pad_to = 5
> >>> (a + pad_to*(None,))[:pad_to]
> (1, 2, 3, None, None)
> >>> (b + pad_to*(None,))[:pad_to]
> (10, 20, None, None, None)
> >>> (c + pad_to*(None,))[:pad_to]
> ('x', 'y', 'z', 'e', 'f')
> >>>

Well, something like this is what I actually do. But for this first I
have to loop over all tuples and pick out the maximal length, so over
all it won't be a one liner but two loops.