How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

Question

How do I concatenate two lists in Python?

Example:

listone = [1, 2, 3]
listtwo = [4, 5, 6]

Expected outcome:

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Answer 1

Use a simple list comprehension:

joined_list = [item for list_ in [list_one, list_two] for item in list_]

It has all the advantages of the newest approach of using Additional Unpacking Generalizations - i.e. you can concatenate an arbitrary number of different iterables (for example, lists, tuples, ranges, and generators) that way - and it's not limited to Python 3.5 or later.

Answer 2

A really concise way to combine a list of lists is

list_of_lists = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
reduce(list.__add__, list_of_lists)

which gives us

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

Answer 3

 a=[1,2,3]
 b=[4,5,6]

 c=a+b
 print(c)

OUTPUT:

 >>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

In the above code "+" operator is used to concatenate the 2 lists into a single list.

ANOTHER SOLUTION:

 a=[1,2,3]
 b=[4,5,6]
 c=[] #Empty list in which we are going to append the values of list (a) and (b)

 for i in a:
     c.append(i)
 for j in b:
     c.append(j)

 print(c)

OUTPUT:

>>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Answer 4

You can use sets to obtain merged list of unique values

mergedlist = list(set(listone + listtwo))

Answer 5

Python >= 3.5 alternative: [*l1, *l2]

Another alternative has been introduced via the acceptance of PEP 448 which deserves mentioning.

The PEP, titled Additional Unpacking Generalizations, generally reduced some syntactic restrictions when using the starred * expression in Python; with it, joining two lists (applies to any iterable) can now also be done with:

>>> l1 = [1, 2, 3]
>>> l2 = [4, 5, 6]
>>> joined_list = [*l1, *l2]  # unpack both iterables in a list literal
>>> print(joined_list)
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

This functionality was defined for Python 3.5 it hasn't been backported to previous versions in the 3.x family. In unsupported versions a SyntaxError is going to be raised.

As with the other approaches, this too creates as shallow copy of the elements in the corresponding lists.

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The upside to this approach is that you really don't need lists in order to perform it, anything that is iterable will do. As stated in the PEP:

This is also useful as a more readable way of summing iterables into a list, such as my_list + list(my_tuple) + list(my_range) which is now equivalent to just [*my_list, *my_tuple, *my_range].

So while addition with + would raise a TypeError due to type mismatch:

l = [1, 2, 3]
r = range(4, 7)
res = l + r

The following won't:

res = [*l, *r]

because it will first unpack the contents of the iterables and then simply create a list from the contents.

Answer 6

This is quite simple, and I think it was even shown in the tutorial:

>>> listone = [1,2,3]
>>> listtwo = [4,5,6]
>>>
>>> listone + listtwo
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]