Some built-in to pad a list in python

Question

I have a list of size < N and I want to pad it up to the size N with a value.

Certainly, I can use something like the following, but I feel that there sh

Answer 1

If you want to pad with None instead of '', map() does the job:

>>> map(None,[1,2,3],xrange(7))

[(1, 0), (2, 1), (3, 2), (None, 3), (None, 4), (None, 5), (None, 6)]

>>> zip(*map(None,[1,2,3],xrange(7)))[0]

(1, 2, 3, None, None, None, None)

Answer 2

gnibbler's answer is nicer, but if you need a builtin, you could use itertools.izip_longest (zip_longest in Py3k):

itertools.izip_longest( xrange( N ), list )

which will return a list of tuples ( i, list[ i ] ) filled-in to None. If you need to get rid of the counter, do something like:

map( itertools.itemgetter( 1 ), itertools.izip_longest( xrange( N ), list ) )

Answer 3

To go off of kennytm:

def pad(l, size, padding):
    return l + [padding] * abs((len(l)-size))

>>> l = [1,2,3]
>>> pad(l, 7, 0)
[1, 2, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0]

Answer 4

There is no built-in function for this. But you could compose the built-ins for your task (or anything :p).

(Modified from itertool's padnone and take recipes)

from itertools import chain, repeat, islice

def pad_infinite(iterable, padding=None):
   return chain(iterable, repeat(padding))

def pad(iterable, size, padding=None):
   return islice(pad_infinite(iterable, padding), size)

Usage:

>>> list(pad([1,2,3], 7, ''))
[1, 2, 3, '', '', '', '']