I quite often run into a situation where I want to treat a list as a circular (repeating) one, and want to take a specific sublist of it, such as...
One past the end of the list:
Append[#, First@#] & @ {a, b, c}
{a, b, c, a}
An item preceding the list included:
Prepend[#, Last@#] & @ {a, b, c}
{c, a, b, c}
Three rounds of the circular list from the start:
Join[#, #, #] & @ {a, b, c}
{a, b, c, a, b, c, a, b, c}
Or even every second item on the list, for two rounds:
Join[#, #][[;; ;; 2]] & @ {a, b, c}
{a, c, b}
Obviously there are more of these where you can combine extended features of Part
(the [[
... ]]
syntax) over circular lists.
What would be the most practical (short, clean, efficient, maybe even elegant) ways to do this, without writing one-off code every time such a small need arises?