I am trying to flatten a list using list comprehension in python. My list is somewhat like
[[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], 7, 8]
just for printing then individual item in this list of list I wrote this function:
def flat(listoflist):
for item in listoflist:
if type(item) != list:
print(item)
else:
for num in item:
print(num)
interactive output:
>>> flat(list1)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Then I used the same logic to flatten my list through list comprehension I am getting the following error
list2 = [item if type(item) != list else num for num in item for item in list1]
Which gives me the following error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'int' object is not iterable
How can I flatten this type of list-of-list using using list comprehension ?
>>> from collections import Iterable
>>> from itertools import chain
One-liner:
>>> list(chain.from_iterable(item if isinstance(item,Iterable) and
not isinstance(item, basestring) else [item] for item in lis))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
A readable version:
>>> def func(x): #use `str` in py3.x
... if isinstance(x, Iterable) and not isinstance(x, basestring):
... return x
... return [x]
...
>>> list(chain.from_iterable(func(x) for x in lis))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
#works for strings as well
>>> lis = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6], 7, 8, "foobar"]
>>> list(chain.from_iterable(func(x) for x in lis))
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 'foobar']
Using nested list comprehension:(Going to be slow compared to itertools.chain
):
>>> [ele for item in (func(x) for x in lis) for ele in item]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 'foobar']