This one’s a quick exercise in slices, if you’re comfortable with those in Python. I like that (to me) the solution suggests an interesting loop, one that isn’t a ready for-loop.

It also suggests an interesting question of memory usage, maybe. What’s going on with s, and how is it shrinking (or not?). Are we changing the original input string? Other sort of “basic” questions that may test the applicant’s familiarity with runtime environments.

def solution(s):
    res = []
    while len(s) > 1:
        p, s = s[:2], s[2:]
        res.append(p)
    if len(s) == 1:
        res.append(s+'_')
    return res

Would be curious to see this without slices. I like this, though, that it motivates slices and an “interesting” for loop. More exercises on strings can be found here.

Real-World Application

I don’t think there’s a ready real-world application for this. However, taking a single stream of data, and digesting it into smaller chunks and feeding those into a later collection: that happens all the time. I think the skills exercised by this particular problem are pretty tactical (slices, for-loop wrangling) but the discussion about resource usage or other larger design questions can invite consideration of real-world analogs.