Note: I know there is probably an answer for this on StackOverflow already, I just can't find it.
I need to do this:
>>> lst = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> first_two = lst.magic_pop(2)
>>> first_two
[1, 2]
>>> lst
[3, 4, 5, 6]
Now magic_pop doesn't exist, I used it just to show an example of what I need. Is there a method like magic_pop that would help me to do everything in a pythonic way?
Do it in two steps. Use a slice to get the first two elements, then remove that slice from the list.
first_list = lst[:2]
del lst[:2]
If you want a one-liner, you can wrap it in a function.
def splice(lst, start = 0, end = None):
if end is None:
end = len(lst)
partial = lst[start:end]
del lst[start:end]
return partial
first_list = splice(lst, end = 2)