Flattening List Comprehensions in Python
Python has list comprehensions,
syntactic sugar for building lists from an expression.
>>> [2 * i for i in (2, 3, 5, 7, 11)]
[4, 6, 10, 14, 22]
This doesn't work so well when the comprehension expression
is itself a list: you end up with a list of lists.
>>> def gen():
... for l in [['a', 'b'], ['c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]:
... yield l
...
>>> [l for l in gen()]
[['a', 'b'], ['c'], ['d', 'e', 'f']]
This is ugly. Here's one way to build a flattened list,
but it's less elegant than the comprehension.
>>> x = []
>>> for l in gen():
... x.extend(l)
...
>>> x
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
It took me a while to find a readable list comprehension,
with a little help from Google.
Use sum() on the outer list and prime it with an empty list, [].
Python will concatenate the inner lists, producing a flattened list.
>>> sum([l for l in gen()], [])
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
Alternatively, you can use itertools.chain().
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.chain(*gen()))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
That might be slightly more efficient,
though I find the sum() to be a little more readable.
>>> import itertools
>>> list(itertools.chain(*gen()))
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
That might be slightly more efficient,
though I find the sum() to be a little more readable.
Edit: I forgot about nested comprehensions
>>> [inner
... for outer in gen()
... for inner in outer]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
Somewhat cryptic on one line however:
>>> [j for i in gen() for j in i]
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']