>>>>> "Christos" == TZOTZIOY <Christos> writes:
>> For quick-and-dirty stuff, it's often convenient to flatten a sequence >> (which perl does, surprise surprise, by default): >> >> [1,2,[3,"hello",[[4]]]] -> >> >> [1, 2, 3, 'hello', 4] Christos> See Python Library Reference, "5.16.3 Recipes". Now Christos> that all and any (also The recipe is: def flatten(listOfLists): return list(chain(*listOfLists)) That one is trivial, because it only flattens one level. The flattening I'm talking about involves flattening to arbitrary depth to get a single sequence of "atoms". The itertools implementation might also be able to avoid recursion by using a stack. Christos> This is just a personal opinion, but I detest restraints Christos> on library (itertools module in this case) expansion Christos> when talking about such useful *building blocks*. Yeah - esp. in the case of flattening. If it was deemed useful enough to be the default behavior in perl (which is admittedly braindamaged), it should surely warrant being included as a single function in the stdlib. -- Ville Vainio http://tinyurl.com/2prnb -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list