zip in Python
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-07-05 08:03:36 - Graham Ellis
Zipping has become synonymouse with compressing data in programming terms; originally the use of the word in that sense came from zipping up a bag so that a whole lot of contents were held together, but these days the compression (pushing everything into the bag) is kind of expected.Python's zip function takes us back to the older meaning - it allows two or more lists of the same length to be combined into a list of tuples, also with the same number of members.
For example, I may have two lists:
first = [4,27,46,51]
place = ["Melksham","Chippenham","Swindon","Didcot"]and if I zip them together
togeths = zip(first,place)
print togethsI'll get:
[(4, 'Melksham'), (27, 'Chippenham'), (46, 'Swindon'), (51, 'Didcot')]Image from Morguefile - attribution not required, but freely offered with thanks for the resource.