unzip array of arrays?

[Tobiah]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:13:34 -0800, Chris Rebert wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Tobiah <toby at tobiah.org> wrote:
>> Although it's trivial to program, I wondered whether
>> there was a builtin or particularly concise way to
>> express this idea:
>>
>>> a = [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)]
>>> field[a, 2]
>> [2, 4, 6]
>>
>> where field() is some made up function.
> 
> Python 2.6 (r26:66714, Nov 18 2008, 21:48:52)
> [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5484)] on darwin
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> a= [(1, 2), (3, 4), (5, 6)]
>>>> zip(*a)
> [(1, 3, 5), (2, 4, 6)]
>>>> zip(*a)[1]
> (2, 4, 6)

That would be what I was after.  Where can I read about
this mysterious use of the '*'?  It only works in the
context of the zip() function.  It's hard to understand
how the interpreter handles that.

Thanks,

Toby