Pythonic way to split a list into first and rest?
first, rest = l[0], l[1:]
Basically the same, except that it's a oneliner. Tuple assigment rocks.
This is a bit longer and less obvious, but generalized for all iterables (instead of being restricted to sliceables):
i = iter(l)
first = next(i) # i.next() in older versions
rest = list(i)
You can do
first = l.pop(0)
and then l will be the rest. It modifies your original list, though, so maybe it’s not what you want.