Destructuring assignment

In assignments, you can split an Iterable into values using the “unpacking” syntax:

Destructuring as values

a, b = (1, 2)
print(a)
# Prints: 1
print(b)
# Prints: 2

If you try to unpack more than the length of the iterable, you’ll get an error:

a, b, c = [1]
# Raises: ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 3, got 1)

Destructuring as a list

You can unpack a list of unknown length using the following syntax:

head, *tail = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Here, we extract the first value as a scalar, and the other values as a list:

print(head)
# Prints: 1
print(tail)
# Prints: [2, 3, 4, 5]

Which is equivalent to:

l = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
head = l[0]
tail = l[1:]

It also works with multiple elements or elements form the end of the list:

a, b, *other, z = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print(a, b, z, other)
# Prints: 1 2 5 [3, 4]

Ignoring values in destructuring assignments

If you’re only interested in a given value, you can use \_ to indicate you aren’t interested. Note: this will still set \_, just most people don’t use it as a variable.

a, _ = [1, 2]
print(a)
# Prints: 1
a, _, c = (1, 2, 3)
print(a)
# Prints: 1
print(c)
# Prints: 3

Ignoring lists in destructuring assignments

Finally, you can ignore many values using the *_ syntax in the assignment:

a, *_ = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print(a)
# Prints: 1

which is not really interesting, as you could using indexing on the list instead. Where it gets nice is to keep first and last values in one assignment:

a, *_, b = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
print(a, b)
# Prints: 1 5

or extract several values at once:

a, _, b, _, c, *_ = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
print(a, b, c)
# Prints: 1 3 5