Saving iterator from python's zip

Question

So, I have a function that I have to call a ton of times. That function iterates through a list by pairs like so:

for a, b in zip(the_list, the_list[1:]):
    #          


        

Answer 1

pairs = list(zip(the_list, the_list[1:]))

for a,b in pairs:
    # etc...

Answer 2

You can buffer a generator to a list like so:

z = list(zip(x, y))

However, I doubt there'll be much performance benefit in this, since zip is itself just iterating over its arguments, which is what you'd end up doing if you buffered it to a list. There's not really much "computation" going on when you call zip.

Edit: This assumes you're using Python 3, wherein zip really does return a generator. In Python 2, zip returns a list, so you're probably better off reusing this list between function calls.