Iterate over pairs in a list (circular fashion) in Python

Question

The problem is easy, I want to iterate over each element of the list and the next one in pairs (wrapping the last one with the first).

I\'ve thought about two unpyth

Answer 1

Here's a version that supports an optional start index (for example to return (4, 0) as the first pair, use start = -1:

import itertools

def iterrot(lst, start = 0):

    if start == 0:
        i = iter(lst)
    elif start > 0:
        i1 = itertools.islice(lst, start, None)
        i2 = itertools.islice(lst, None, start)
        i = itertools.chain(i1, i2)
    else:
        # islice doesn't support negative slice indices so...
        lenl = len(lst)
        i1 = itertools.islice(lst, lenl + start, None)
        i2 = itertools.islice(lst, None, lenl + start)
        i = itertools.chain(i1, i2)
    return i


def iterpairs(lst, start = 0):

    i = iterrot(lst, start)     

    first = prev = i.next()
    for item in i:
        yield prev, item
        prev = item
    yield prev, first


def itertrios(lst, start = 0):

    i = iterrot(lst, start)     

    first = prevprev = i.next()
    second = prev = i.next()
    for item in i:
        yield prevprev, prev, item
        prevprev, prev = prev, item

    yield prevprev, prev, first
    yield prev, first, second