Source: 📖 Effective Python item 13
Unpacking the items of an iterator into multiple variables can easily be done by indexing and slicing the iterator:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
first = my_list[0]
second = my list[1]
others = my_list[2:]
print(first)
print(second)
print(others)
>>>
1
2
[3, 4, 5, 6]
However, this is visually noisy and takes multiple lines. A cleaner, more readable way of achieving the same thing is through the use of catch-all unpacking:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
first, second, *others = my_list
print(first)
print(second)
print(others)
>>>
1
2
[3, 4, 5, 6]
This also means that unpacking variables can be added and removed without having to worry about updating slicing indexes of all other unpacking variables:
my_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
first, second, third, *others = my_list
print(first)
print(second)
print(third)
print(others)
>>>
1
2
3
[4, 5, 6]
Above, when the variable third is added, *others is automatically filled with all remaining values after first, second and third have been filled. This would have to be done manually with a slicing approach, which can be very error-prone and time consuming.