Transpose/Unzip Function (inverse of zip)?

In 2.x, zip is its own inverse! Provided you use the special * operator.

>>> zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'), (1, 2, 3, 4)]

This is equivalent to calling zip with each element of the list as a separate argument:

zip(('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4))

except the arguments are passed to zip directly (after being converted to a tuple), so there's no need to worry about the number of arguments getting too big.

In 3.x, zip returns a lazy iterator, but this is trivially converted:

>>> list(zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)]))
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'), (1, 2, 3, 4)]

You could also do

result = ([ a for a,b in original ], [ b for a,b in original ])

It should scale better. Especially if Python makes good on not expanding the list comprehensions unless needed.

(Incidentally, it makes a 2-tuple (pair) of lists, rather than a list of tuples, like zip does.)

If generators instead of actual lists are ok, this would do that:

result = (( a for a,b in original ), ( b for a,b in original ))

The generators don't munch through the list until you ask for each element, but on the other hand, they do keep references to the original list.

I like to use zip(*iterable) (which is the piece of code you're looking for) in my programs as so:

def unzip(iterable):
    return zip(*iterable)

I find unzip more readable.

If you have lists that are not the same length, you may not want to use zip as per Patricks answer. This works:

>>> zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4)])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd'), (1, 2, 3, 4)]

But with different length lists, zip truncates each item to the length of the shortest list:

>>> zip(*[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4), ('e', )])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e')]

You can use map with no function to fill empty results with None:

>>> map(None, *[('a', 1), ('b', 2), ('c', 3), ('d', 4), ('e', )])
[('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'), (1, 2, 3, 4, None)]

zip() is marginally faster though.