accessing two or more list in a single for-loop

Question

provided that I have two lists in same length, list_a, list_b.

I can print they items in a single for loop as follows:

for i in range(0, len(list_a)):
    print "%s %s" % (list_a[i], list_b[i])

is there any alternative and elegant way to do above mentioned task ?

I have tried

for a, b in list_a, list_b:
    print ""

Answer 1

You need zip():

for a, b in zip(list_a, list_b):
     # whatever

When the lists are long and you are using Python 2.x, you might prefer itertools.izip() to save some memory.