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.

If l is string typeI would suggest:

first, remainder = l.split(None, maxsplit=1)

Yet another one, working with python 2.7. Just use an intermediate function. Logical as the new behavior mimics what happened for functions parameters passing.

li = [1, 2, 3]
first, rest = (lambda x, *y: (x, y))(*li)