Zip with list output instead of tuple

Question

What is the fastest and most elegant way of doing list of lists from two lists?

I have

In [1]: a=[1,2,3,4,5,6]

In [2]: b=[7,8,9,10,11,12]

In [3]: z         


        

Answer 1

I love the elegance of the zip function, but using the itemgetter() function in the operator module appears to be much faster. I wrote a simple script to test this:

import time
from operator import itemgetter

list1 = list()
list2 = list()
origlist = list()
for i in range (1,5000000):
        t = (i, 2*i)
        origlist.append(t)

print "Using zip"
starttime = time.time()
list1, list2 = map(list, zip(*origlist))
elapsed = time.time()-starttime
print elapsed

print "Using itemgetter"
starttime = time.time()
list1 = map(itemgetter(0),origlist)
list2 = map(itemgetter(1),origlist)
elapsed = time.time()-starttime
print elapsed

I expected zip to be faster, but the itemgetter method wins by a long shot:

Using zip
6.1550450325
Using itemgetter
0.768098831177