title: Python breaking and transposing a large list into smaller lists
body: <p>I have a large list:</p>
  
  <pre><code>X= [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>that I want to transpose into smaller lists:
  (x1- x5 are placeholders for remapping the data in X, for X=17, the length of the smaller lists is all that matters)</p>
  
  <pre><code>x1 = [0, 1], 
  x2 = [0, 1, 2, 3] 
  x3 = [0, 1, 2, 3] 
  x4 = [0, 1, 2, 3]
  x5 = [0, 1]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>EXPECTED RESULT: To map the data in the large list into x1-x5 like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>x1 = [0, 5]
  x2 = [1, 6, 10, 13] 
  x3 = [2, 7, 11, 14] 
  x4 = [3, 8, 12, 15]
  x5 = [4, 9]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried working my way backwards by appending the smaller lists into a large list s and transposing them into t like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>s = [[0, 1], [0, 1, 2, 3], [0, 1, 2, 3], [0, 1, 2, 3], [0, 1]]
  t=map(None,*s) 
  [(0, 0, 0, 0, 0), (1, 1, 1, 1, 1), (None, 2, 2, 2, None), (None, 3, 3, 3, None)]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is where I got stuck. Any help here would be appreciated. I'm sure there's a simpler way to do this without appending, and remapping x into t, and breaking t into x1 -x5. </p>