Iterate through pairs of items in a Python list

Question

Is it possible to iterate a list in the following way in Python (treat this code as pseudocode)?

a = [5, 7, 11, 4, 5]
for v, w in a:
    print [v, w]

And it should produce

[5, 7]
[7, 11]
[11, 4]
[4, 5]

Asked By: marvin_yorke

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Source

Answer 1

Nearly verbatim from Iterate over pairs in a list (circular fashion) in Python:

def pairs(seq):
    i = iter(seq)
    prev = next(i)
    for item in i:
        yield prev, item
        prev = item

Answered By: Gabe

Answer 2

From the itertools recipes:

from itertools import tee

def pairwise(iterable):
    "s -> (s0,s1), (s1,s2), (s2, s3), ..."
    a, b = tee(iterable)
    next(b, None)
    return zip(a, b)

for v, w in pairwise(a):
    ...

Answered By: Jochen Ritzel

Answer 3

To do that you should do:

a =  [5, 7, 11, 4, 5]
for i in range(len(a)-1):
    print [a[i], a[i+1]]

Answered By: Santiago Alessandri

Answer 4

>>> a = [5, 7, 11, 4, 5]
>>> for n,k in enumerate(a[:-1]):
...     print a[n],a[n+1]
...
5 7
7 11
11 4
4 5

Answered By: ghostdog74

Answer 5

You can zip the list with itself sans the first element:

a = [5, 7, 11, 4, 5]

for previous, current in zip(a, a[1:]):
    print(previous, current)

This works even if your list has no elements or only 1 element (in which case zip returns an empty iterable and the code in the for loop never executes). It doesn’t work on generators, only sequences (tuple, list, str, etc).

Answered By: hluk

Iterate through pairs of items in a Python list

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