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

If you want to merge the two lists in sorted form, you can use the merge function from the heapq library.

from heapq import merge

a = [1, 2, 4]
b = [2, 4, 6, 7]

print list(merge(a, b))

Answer 2

You could simply use the + or += operator as follows:

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

c = a + b

Or:

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

c += (a + b)

Also, if you want the values in the merged list to be unique you can do:

c = list(set(a + b))

Answer 3

You can use the + operator to combine them:

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

joinedlist = listone + listtwo

Output:

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

Answer 4

It's also possible to create a generator that simply iterates over the items in both lists using itertools.chain(). This allows you to chain lists (or any iterable) together for processing without copying the items to a new list:

import itertools
for item in itertools.chain(listone, listtwo):
    # Do something with each list item

Answer 5

If you need to merge two ordered lists with complicated sorting rules, you might have to roll it yourself like in the following code (using a simple sorting rule for readability :-) ).

list1 = [1,2,5]
list2 = [2,3,4]
newlist = []

while list1 and list2:
    if list1[0] == list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
        list2.pop(0)
    elif list1[0] < list2[0]:
        newlist.append(list1.pop(0))
    else:
        newlist.append(list2.pop(0))

if list1:
    newlist.extend(list1)
if list2:
    newlist.extend(list2)

assert(newlist == [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

Answer 6

You could use the append() method defined on list objects:

mergedlist =[]
for elem in listone:
    mergedlist.append(elem)
for elem in listtwo:
    mergedlist.append(elem)