assign only first few items of a tuple/list

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Daniel Fetchinson
<fetchinson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks, I swear I used to know this but can't find it anywhere.
> Say I have a list x = [ 1,2,3,4,5 ] and only care about the first two items.
> I'd like to assign the first two items to two variables, something like,
>
> a, b, _ = x
>
> but the above will not work, of course, but what is the common idiom
> for this that does?

Try this:

a, b, *_ = x

Assigns 1 to a, 2 to b, and [3,4,5] to _

ChrisA