I've been trying to figure out a way to combine lists similar to how zip() works. The main difference though is I want to work with different length lists and combine them. I came up with the example below, which returns a list like I'm wanting. I'm assuming it's somewhat efficient (although I wonder if the lists were huge that the 'if' statement might slow things down?).
If anyone has time, I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on whether this is an efficient way to do something like this, if it's horrible and slow, etc. Thanks! Jay # ---------------------------- a = ['a', 'b', 'c'] b = ['1', '2'] c = ['a1', 'b2', 'c3', 'd4', 'e5'] def combineLists(theLists): cntList = len(theLists) lenList = [len(x) for x in theLists] maxList = max(lenList) combinedList = [] for x in range(maxList): for n in range(cntList): if lenList[n] > x: combinedList.append(theLists[n][x]) print combinedList combineLists([a, b, c]) # ---------------------------- # --> ['a', '1', 'a1', 'b', '2', 'b2', 'c', 'c3', 'd4', 'e5'] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list