Python's slice notation's obscure secret

Okay, so maybe it isn't that obscure - but it isn't often used that's I've seen.

There is a third parameter in the slice syntax, called the stride. It is the number of characters to advance for each "unit" in the slice. The default is 1.

The following are equivalent:

foo = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
foo[:]
> [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
foo[::1]
> [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]

What if you wanted only the even indexes? You could write an iterator or a loop, but you can also do it this way:

foo[::2]
> [0,2,4,6,8]

Cool! Reversing a string is just as easy:

bar = 'asdf'
bar
> asdf
bar[::-1]
> fdsa