Relative Items

One of the things I find myself doing a lot in Grasshopper is getting consecutive pairs of things in a list. And I can do that by taking advantage of two components, the shift list and shortest list. It might get a little confusing so bear with me here. Let's look at the whole flow

Now, let's break this down. Let's look at the first part, the shift list. If you set wrap to false, this essentially moves the first item of the list off. "shifting" the list up.

Now, if you pass that shifted list into the shortest list along with the original list, It will trim off the end of the original list, giving you the list with last item.

Of course, you can take the longer route and do this with a few cull indices.

But look at how much messier it is. Also, the last index component is from Pufferfish which is a plugin. To get the last index of the list, you have to put a list length - 1, Which makes this flow even messier.

Final Thoughts

It's just two components but it makes your workflow a lot cleaner. Especially if you have to do this multiple times in a single script, which I know I do a lot.

Okay, it's a short one this week.

Thanks for reading,

Braden.