How to merge lists into a list of tuples?

Question

What is the Pythonic approach to achieve the following?

# Original lists:

list_a = [1, 2, 3, 4]
list_b = [5, 6, 7, 8]

# List of tuples from \'list_a\' and          


        

Answer 1

I know this is an old question and was already answered, but for some reason, I still wanna post this alternative solution. I know it's easy to just find out which built-in function does the "magic" you need, but it doesn't hurt to know you can do it by yourself.

>>> list_1 = ['Ace', 'King']
>>> list_2 = ['Spades', 'Clubs', 'Diamonds']
>>> deck = []
>>> for i in range(max((len(list_1),len(list_2)))):
        while True:
            try:
                card = (list_1[i],list_2[i])
            except IndexError:
                if len(list_1)>len(list_2):
                    list_2.append('')
                    card = (list_1[i],list_2[i])
                elif len(list_1)<len(list_2):
                    list_1.append('')
                    card = (list_1[i], list_2[i])
                continue
            deck.append(card)
            break
>>>
>>> #and the result should be:
>>> print deck
>>> [('Ace', 'Spades'), ('King', 'Clubs'), ('', 'Diamonds')]

Answer 2

Youre looking for the builtin function zip.