Idiomatic way to unpack variable length list of maximum size n

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I'm reading a file and unpacking each line like this:

for line in filter(fh):
  a, b, c, d = line.split()

However, it's possible that line may have more or fewer columns than the variables I wish to unpack. In the case when there are fewer, I'd like to assign None to the dangling variables, and in the case where there are more, I'd like to ignore them. What's the idiomatic way to do this? I'm using python 2.7.

iterable-unpacking python
5 Answers

In Python 3, you can use itertools.zip_longest, like this:

from itertools import zip_longest

max_params = 4

lst = [1, 2, 3, 4]
a, b, c, d = next(zip(*zip_longest(lst, range(max_params))))
print(f'{a}, {b}, {c}, {d}') # 1, 2, 3, 4

lst = [1, 2, 3]
a, b, c, d = next(zip(*zip_longest(lst, range(max_params))))
print(f'{a}, {b}, {c}, {d}') # 1, 2, 3, None

For Python 2.x you can follow this answer.

user_24113200
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