Joining pairs of elements of a list

Question

I know that a list can be joined to make one long string as in:

x = [\'a\', \'b\', \'c\', \'d\']
print \'\'.join(x)

Obviously this would ou

Answer 1

Use an iterator.

List comprehension:

>>> si = iter(['abcd', 'e', 'fg', 'hijklmn', 'opq', 'r'])
>>> [c+next(si, '') for c in si]
['abcde', 'fghijklmn', 'opqr']

• Very efficient for memory usage.
• Exactly one traversal of s

Generator expression:

>>> si = iter(['abcd', 'e', 'fg', 'hijklmn', 'opq', 'r'])
>>> pair_iter = (c+next(si, '') for c in si)
>>> pair_iter # can be used in a for loop
<generator object at 0x4ccaa8>
>>> list(pair_iter) 
['abcde', 'fghijklmn', 'opqr']

• use as an iterator

Using map, str.__add__, iter

>>> si = iter(['abcd', 'e', 'fg', 'hijklmn', 'opq', 'r'])
>>> map(str.__add__, si, si)
['abcde', 'fghijklmn', 'opqr']

next(iterator[, default]) is available starting in Python 2.6

Answer 2

just to be pythonic :-)

>>> x = ['a1sd','23df','aaa','ccc','rrrr', 'ssss', 'e', '']
>>> [x[i] + x[i+1] for i in range(0,len(x),2)]
['a1sd23df', 'aaaccc', 'rrrrssss', 'e']

in case the you want to be alarmed if the list length is odd you can try:

[x[i] + x[i+1] if not len(x) %2 else 'odd index' for i in range(0,len(x),2)]

Best of Luck

Answer 3

>>> lst =  ['abcd', 'e', 'fg', 'hijklmn', 'opq', 'r'] 
>>> print [lst[2*i]+lst[2*i+1] for i in range(len(lst)/2)]
['abcde', 'fghijklmn', 'opqr']

Answer 4

Well I would do it this way as I am no good with Regs..

CODE

t = '1. eat, food\n\
7am\n\
2. brush, teeth\n\
8am\n\
3. crack, eggs\n\
1pm'.splitlines()

print [i+j for i,j in zip(t[::2],t[1::2])]

output:

['1. eat, food   7am', '2. brush, teeth   8am', '3. crack, eggs   1pm']  

Hope this helps :)

Answer 5

Without building temporary lists:

>>> import itertools
>>> s = 'abcdefgh'
>>> si = iter(s)
>>> [''.join(each) for each in itertools.izip(si, si)]
['ab', 'cd', 'ef', 'gh']

or:

>>> import itertools
>>> s = 'abcdefgh'
>>> si = iter(s)
>>> map(''.join, itertools.izip(si, si))
['ab', 'cd', 'ef', 'gh']

Answer 6

You can use slice notation with steps:

>>> x = "abcdefghijklm"
>>> x[0::2] #0. 2. 4...
'acegikm'
>>> x[1::2] #1. 3. 5 ..
'bdfhjl'
>>> [i+j for i,j in zip(x[::2], x[1::2])] # zip makes (0,1),(2,3) ...
['ab', 'cd', 'ef', 'gh', 'ij', 'kl']

Same logic applies for lists too. String lenght doesn't matter, because you're simply adding two strings together.