unpacking first few items of iterable

[MRAB]

On 2012-12-13 19:37, Daniel Fetchinson wrote:
> Hi folks, I swear I used to know this but can't find it anywhere:
>
> What's the standard idiom for unpacking the first few items of an
> iterable whose total length is unknown?
>
> Something like
>
> a, b, c, _ = myiterable
>
> where _ could eat up a variable number of items, in case I'm only
> interested in the first 3 items?
>
You could do this:

from itertools import islice

a, b, c = islice(myiterable, 3)