CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.xlist
livisaur
livisaur

Reputation: 41

How do I combine two lists of strings at every other element?

How would I go from

lst1 = ['the', 'brown', 'jumps', 'the', 'dog']
lst2 = ['quick', 'fox', 'over', 'lazy']

to this output:

['the', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']

without defining a new function?

So far I've tried:

insertcounter = 1
for k in lst2:
    lst1.insert(insertcounter, k)
    insertcounter += 1

But it's just inserting the entire lst2 at the first index instead of looping through. I'm sure the answer is in plain sight but I'm a noob and it's not hitting me.

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 653

Answers (6)

0x263A
0x263A

Reputation: 1859

You could do it using range and zip:

lst1 = ['the', 'brown', 'jumps', 'the', 'dog']
lst2 = ['quick', 'fox', 'over', 'lazy']

for i, word in zip(range(1, len(lst2)*2, 2), lst2):
    lst1.insert(i, word)

print(lst1)
# ['the', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']

TIO

Upvotes: 1

Daniel Hao
Daniel Hao

Reputation: 4980

Just for fun, I will try this way:

It's similar with roundrobin but maybe faster: it produces the same output as roundrobin(), but may perform better for some inputs (in particular when the number of iterables is large). If the interables is small, it prob. will make a big difference though.

For the sake of completely honest with this lib, you have to install it first by doing pip install more_itertools. Thanks @Matiiss reminder.

>>> from more_itertools import interleave_longest
>>> list(interleave_longest(lst1, lst2))
['the', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']
>>>

Upvotes: 1

Gabio
Gabio

Reputation: 9484

You can use itertools.zip_longest to iterate over the lists together even if the lists have different length:

import itertools

output = []
for i,j in itertools.zip_longest(lst1, lst2):
   output.append(i)
   if j:
       output.append(j)
print(output)

Upvotes: 0

murat-es
murat-es

Reputation: 1

lst1 = ['the', 'brown', 'jumps', 'the', 'dog',"murat"]
lst2 = ['quick', 'fox', 'over', 'lazy',"ali"]

newList=[]

if(len(lst1)>len(lst2)):
    for i in range(len(lst1)):
        newList.append(lst1[i])
        if(len(lst2)>i):
            newList.append(lst2[i])
else:
    for i in range(len(lst2)):
        newList.append(lst2[i])
        if(len(lst1)>i):
            newList.append(lst1[i])

print(newList)

Upvotes: 0

Kelly Bundy
Kelly Bundy

Reputation: 27588

Change insertcounter += 1 to insertcounter += 2.

Upvotes: 4

JacobIRR
JacobIRR

Reputation: 8946

You could loop over the range of the longer list and trap IndexError exceptions as needed:

lst1 = ['the', 'brown', 'jumps', 'the', 'dog']
lst2 = ['quick', 'fox', 'over', 'lazy']
out = []
for i in range(len(lst1)):
    try:
        out.append(lst1[i])
        out.append(lst2[i])
    except IndexError:
        continue

print(out)

Result:

['the', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions