Cappy2112 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What does the leading * do?
It causes the list/tuple following the * to be unpacked into function arguments. Eg >>> zip(*[(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6)]) [(1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6)] is the same as >>> zip((1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6)) [(1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6)] The * should make you think of dereferencing things (eg pointer de-reference in C). Its equivalent to the now deprecated apply function which does the same thing in a more wordy fashion, ie apply the list as parameters to the function. >>> apply(zip, [(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6)]) [(1, 4), (2, 5), (3, 6)] -- Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
