A more pythonic way of iterating a list while excluding an element each iteration

Question

I have the following code: ``` items = ["one", "two", "three"] for i in range(0, len(items)): for index, element in enumerate(items): if index != i: # do something with element ``` Basically I want to exclude every element once and iterate the rest. So for the list I have above, I'd like the following iterations: - "two", "three" - "one", "three" - "one", "two" The code I've written now seems a little C++-ish, is there a better solution? (I do not want to hold all possible lists in a variable) EDIT: I didn't state this but the lists size isn't necessarily 3. It can be of any size. EDIT 2: It seems there's another misunderstanding: if I have a list of N, then I want N lists of size N-1, each missing an element from the original list. EDIT 3: A list with 4 items, should give this result: - 1, 2, 3 - 1, 3, 4 - 1, 2, 4 - 2, 3, 4

Accepted Answer

Although upvoted like crazy, my first solution wasn't what the OP wanted, which is N lists, each missing exactly one of the N original elements:

```
>>> from itertools import combinations
>>> L = ["one", "two", "three", "four"]
>>> for R in combinations(L, len(L) - 1):
...     print " and ".join(R)
...
one and two and three
one and two and four
one and three and four
two and three and four
```

See the revision history for the source of the discussion below.

A more pythonic way of iterating a list while excluding an element each iteration

Solution

Problem