Python: zip two lists together without truncation

Question

I have two lists:

frame = [\"mercury\", \"noir\", \"silver\", \"white\" ] 
seat_colors = [ 
            \"coconut white\", \"yello\", \"black\", \"green\",          


        

Answer 1

Use itertools.izip_longest() to keep zipping until the longest sequence has been exhausted.

This uses a default value (defaulting to None) to stand in for the missing values of the shorter list.

However, your output is creating the product of two lists; use itertools.product() for that:

from itertools import product

for a_frame, color in product(frame, seat_colors):
    print '{}, {}'.format(a_frame, color)

The two concepts are quite different. The izip_longest() approach will produce len(seat_colors) items, while the product produces len(seat_colors) * len(frame) items instead.

Answer 2

You can use itertools.product:

import itertools
for item in itertools.product(frame, seat_colors):
    print item

This produces the same results as your nested for loops.