Understanding *x ,= lst

Question

I\'m going through some old code trying to understand what it does, and I came across this odd statement:

*x ,= p

p is a list in t

Answer 1

You can clearly understand it from below example

L = [1, 2, 3, 4]
while L:
    temp, *L = L             
    print(temp, L)

what it does is, the front variable will get the first item every time and the remaining list will be given to L.

The output will look shown below.

1 [2, 3, 4]
2 [3, 4]
3 [4]
4 []

Also look at below example

x, *y, z = "python"
print(x,y,z)

In this both x,z will get each one letter from the string meaning first letter is assigned to x and the last letter will be assigned to z and the remaining string will be assigned to variable y.

p ['y', 't', 'h', 'o'] n

One more example,

a, b, *c = [0,1,2,3]
print(a,b,c)

0 1 [2,3]

Boundary case: If there is nothing remaining for star variable then it will get an empty list.

Example:

a,b=[1]
print(a,b)

1 []