python - get list of tuples first index?

Question

What's the most compact way to return the following:

Given a list of tuples, return a list consisting of the tuples first (or second, doesn't matter) elements.

For:

[(1,'one'),(2,'two'),(3,'three')]

returned list would be

[1,2,3]

Answer 1

use zip if you need both

>>> r=(1,'one'),(2,'two'),(3,'three')
>>> zip(*r)
[(1, 2, 3), ('one', 'two', 'three')]