For example, I have three lists (of the same length)
A = [1,2,3]
B = [a,b,c]
C = [x,y,z]
and i want to merge it into something like: [[1,a,
It looks like your code is meant to say answer = []
, and leaving that out will cause problems. But the major problem you have is this:
answer = answer.extend(temp)
extend
modifies answer
and returns None. Leave this as just answer.extend(temp)
and it will work. You likely also want to use the append
method rather than extend
- append puts one object (the list temp
) at the end of answer
, while extend
appends each item of temp individually, ultimately giving the flattened version of what you're after: [1, 'a', 'x', 2, 'b', 'y', 3, 'c', 'z']
.
But, rather than reinventing the wheel, this is exactly what the builtin zip is for:
>>> A = [1,2,3]
>>> B = ['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> C = ['x', 'y', 'z']
>>> list(zip(A, B, C))
[(1, 'a', 'x'), (2, 'b', 'y'), (3, 'c', 'z')]
Note that in Python 2, zip
returns a list of tuples; in Python 3, it returns a lazy iterator (ie, it builds the tuples as they're requested, rather than precomputing them). If you want the Python 2 behaviour in Python 3, you pass it through list
as I've done above. If you want the Python 3 behaviour in Python 2, use the function izip from itertools.