split list into 2 lists corresponding to every other element

Question

I know there are many chunky ways to do this, but I am looking for a slick pythonic way to accomplish the following. Given a list of numbers:

a = [0,1,2,3,4,         


        

Answer 1

You want:

b = a[::2]  # Start at first element, then every other.

and:

c = a[1::2]  # Start at second element, then every other.

So now we have what we want:

>>> print(b)
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8]
>>> print(c)
[1, 3, 5, 7, 9]