How does zip(*[iter(s)]*n) work in Python?

Question

iter() is an iterator over a sequence. [x] * n produces a list containing n quantity of x, i.e. a list of length n, where each element is x. *arg unpacks a sequence into arguments for a function call. Therefore you're passing the same iterator 3 times to zip(), and it pulls an item from the iterator each time.

x = iter([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9])
print zip(x, x, x)

The other great answers and comments explain well the roles of argument unpacking and zip().

As Ignacio and ujukatzel say, you pass to zip() three references to the same iterator and zip() makes 3-tuples of the integers—in order—from each reference to the iterator:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
^                    ^                    ^            
      ^                    ^                    ^
            ^                    ^                    ^

And since you ask for a more verbose code sample:

chunk_size = 3
L = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

# iterate over L in steps of 3
for start in range(0,len(L),chunk_size): # xrange() in 2.x; range() in 3.x
    end = start + chunk_size
    print L[start:end] # three-item chunks

Following the values of start and end:

[0:3) #[1,2,3]
[3:6) #[4,5,6]
[6:9) #[7,8,9]

FWIW, you can get the same result with map() with an initial argument of None:

>>> map(None,*[iter(s)]*3)
[(1, 2, 3), (4, 5, 6), (7, 8, 9)]

For more on zip() and map(): http://muffinresearch.co.uk/archives/2007/10/16/python-transposing-lists-with-map-and-zip/

I think one thing that's missed in all the answers (probably obvious to those familiar with iterators) but not so obvious to others is -

Since we have the same iterator, it gets consumed and the remaining elements are used by the zip. So if we simply used the list and not the iter eg.

l = range(9)
zip(*([l]*3)) # note: not an iter here, the lists are not emptied as we iterate 
# output 
[(0, 0, 0), (1, 1, 1), (2, 2, 2), (3, 3, 3), (4, 4, 4), (5, 5, 5), (6, 6, 6), (7, 7, 7), (8, 8, 8)]

Using iterator, pops the values and only keeps remaining available, so for zip once 0 is consumed 1 is available and then 2 and so on. A very subtle thing, but quite clever!!!

iter(s) returns an iterator for s.

[iter(s)]*n makes a list of n times the same iterator for s.

So, when doing zip(*[iter(s)]*n), it extracts an item from all the three iterators from the list in order. Since all the iterators are the same object, it just groups the list in chunks of n.