From your example, it looks like each element in b contains the 1-indexed list in which the node will be stored. Python lacks the automatic numeric variables that R seems to have, so we'll return a tuple of lists. If you can do zero-indexed lists, and you only need two lists (i.e., for your R use case, 1 and 2 are the only values, in python they'll be 0 and 1)
>>> a = range(1, 11)
>>> b = [0,1] * 5
>>> split(a, b)
([1, 3, 5, 7, 9], [2, 4, 6, 8, 10])
Then you can use itertools.compress
:
def split(x, f):
return list(itertools.compress(x, f)), list(itertools.compress(x, (not i for i in f)))
If you need more general input (multiple numbers), something like the following will return an n-tuple:
def split(x, f):
count = max(f) + 1
return tuple( list(itertools.compress(x, (el == i for el in f))) for i in xrange(count) )
>>> split([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], [0,1,1,0,2,3,4,0,1,2])
([1, 4, 8], [2, 3, 9], [5, 10], [6], [7])