Pythonic way to split a list into first and rest?

Question

I think in Python 3 I'll be able to do:

first, *rest = l

which is exactly what I want, but I'm using 2.6. For now I'm doing:

first = l[0]
rest = l[1:]

This is fine, but I was just wondering if there's something more elegant.

Answer 1

first, rest = l[0], l[1:]

Basically the same, except that it's a oneliner. Tuple assigment rocks.

This is a bit longer and less obvious, but generalized for all iterables (instead of being restricted to sliceables):

i = iter(l)
first = next(i) # i.next() in older versions
rest = list(i)

Answer 2

You can do

first = l.pop(0)

and then l will be the rest. It modifies your original list, though, so maybe it’s not what you want.