Most pythonic way to interleave two strings

Question

What\'s the most pythonic way to mesh two strings together?

For example:

Input:

u = \'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\'
l = \'abcdefghijklmnopqrst         


        

Answer 1

For me, the most pythonic* way is the following which pretty much does the same thing but uses the + operator for concatenating the individual characters in each string:

res = "".join(i + j for i, j in zip(u, l))
print(res)
# 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz'

It is also faster than using two join() calls:

In [5]: l1 = 'A' * 1000000; l2 = 'a' * 1000000

In [6]: %timeit "".join("".join(item) for item in zip(l1, l2))
1 loops, best of 3: 442 ms per loop

In [7]: %timeit "".join(i + j for i, j in zip(l1, l2))
1 loops, best of 3: 360 ms per loop

Faster approaches exist, but they often obfuscate the code.

Note: If the two input strings are not the same length then the longer one will be truncated as zip stops iterating at the end of the shorter string. In this case instead of zip one should use zip_longest (izip_longest in Python 2) from the itertools module to ensure that both strings are fully exhausted.

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_{*To take a quote from the Zen of Python: Readability counts.
Pythonic = readability for me; i + j is just visually parsed more easily, at least for my eyes.}

Answer 2

I would use zip() to get a readable and easy way:

result = ''
for cha, chb in zip(u, l):
    result += '%s%s' % (cha, chb)

print result
# 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz'

Answer 3

A lot of these suggestions assume the strings are of equal length. Maybe that covers all reasonable use cases, but at least to me it seems that you might want to accomodate strings of differing lengths too. Or am I the only one thinking the mesh should work a bit like this:

u = "foobar"
l = "baz"
mesh(u,l) = "fboaozbar"

One way to do this would be the following:

def mesh(a,b):
    minlen = min(len(a),len(b))
    return "".join(["".join(x+y for x,y in zip(a,b)),a[minlen:],b[minlen:]])

Answer 4

If you want the fastest way, you can combine itertools with operator.add:

In [36]: from operator import add

In [37]: from itertools import  starmap, izip

In [38]: timeit "".join([i + j for i, j in uzip(l1, l2)])
1 loops, best of 3: 142 ms per loop

In [39]: timeit "".join(starmap(add, izip(l1,l2)))
1 loops, best of 3: 117 ms per loop

In [40]: timeit "".join(["".join(item) for item in zip(l1, l2)])
1 loops, best of 3: 196 ms per loop

In [41]:  "".join(starmap(add, izip(l1,l2))) ==  "".join([i + j   for i, j in izip(l1, l2)]) ==  "".join(["".join(item) for item in izip(l1, l2)])
Out[42]: True

But combining izip and chain.from_iterable is faster again

In [2]: from itertools import  chain, izip

In [3]: timeit "".join(chain.from_iterable(izip(l1, l2)))
10 loops, best of 3: 98.7 ms per loop

There is also a substantial difference between chain(* and chain.from_iterable(....

In [5]: timeit "".join(chain(*izip(l1, l2)))
1 loops, best of 3: 212 ms per loop

There is no such thing as a generator with join, passing one is always going to be slower as python will first build a list using the content because it does two passes over the data, one to figure out the size needed and one to actually do the join which would not be possible using a generator:

join.h:

 /* Here is the general case.  Do a pre-pass to figure out the total
  * amount of space we'll need (sz), and see whether all arguments are
  * bytes-like.
   */

Also if you have different length strings and you don't want to lose data you can use izip_longest :

In [22]: from itertools import izip_longest    
In [23]: a,b = "hlo","elworld"

In [24]:  "".join(chain.from_iterable(izip_longest(a, b,fillvalue="")))
Out[24]: 'helloworld'

For python 3 it is called zip_longest

But for python2, veedrac's suggestion is by far the fastest:

In [18]: %%timeit
res = bytearray(len(u) * 2)
res[::2] = u
res[1::2] = l
str(res)
   ....: 
100 loops, best of 3: 2.68 ms per loop

Answer 5

You could use iteration_utilities.roundrobin¹

u = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
l = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'

from iteration_utilities import roundrobin
''.join(roundrobin(u, l))
# returns 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz'

or the ManyIterables class from the same package:

from iteration_utilities import ManyIterables
ManyIterables(u, l).roundrobin().as_string()
# returns 'AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz'

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^{1 This is from a third-party library I have written: iteration_utilities.}

Answer 6

Just to add another, more basic approach:

st = ""
for char in u:
    st = "{0}{1}{2}".format( st, char, l[ u.index( char ) ] )