Difference between append vs. extend list methods

Question

What's the difference between the list methods append() and extend()?

Answer 1

I hope I can make a useful supplement to this question. If your list stores a specific type object, for example Info, here is a situation that extend method is not suitable: In a for loop and and generating an Info object every time and using extend to store it into your list, it will fail. The exception is like below:

TypeError: 'Info' object is not iterable

But if you use the append method, the result is OK. Because every time using the extend method, it will always treat it as a list or any other collection type, iterate it, and place it after the previous list. A specific object can not be iterated, obviously.

Answer 2

What is the difference between the list methods append and extend?

• append adds its argument as a single element to the end of a list. The length of the list itself will increase by one.
• extend iterates over its argument adding each element to the list, extending the list. The length of the list will increase by however many elements were in the iterable argument.

append

The list.append method appends an object to the end of the list.

my_list.append(object) 

Whatever the object is, whether a number, a string, another list, or something else, it gets added onto the end of my_list as a single entry on the list.

>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar']
>>> my_list.append('baz')
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', 'baz']

So keep in mind that a list is an object. If you append another list onto a list, the first list will be a single object at the end of the list (which may not be what you want):

>>> another_list = [1, 2, 3]
>>> my_list.append(another_list)
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', 'baz', [1, 2, 3]]
                     #^^^^^^^^^--- single item at the end of the list.

extend

The list.extend method extends a list by appending elements from an iterable:

my_list.extend(iterable)

So with extend, each element of the iterable gets appended onto the list. For example:

>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar']
>>> another_list = [1, 2, 3]
>>> my_list.extend(another_list)
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', 1, 2, 3]

Keep in mind that a string is an iterable, so if you extend a list with a string, you'll append each character as you iterate over the string (which may not be what you want):

>>> my_list.extend('baz')
>>> my_list
['foo', 'bar', 1, 2, 3, 'b', 'a', 'z']

Operator Overload, __add__ (+) and __iadd__ (+=)

Both + and += operators are defined for list. They are semantically similar to extend.

my_list + another_list creates a third list in memory, so you can return the result of it, but it requires that the second iterable be a list.

my_list += another_list modifies the list in-place (it is the in-place operator, and lists are mutable objects, as we've seen) so it does not create a new list. It also works like extend, in that the second iterable can be any kind of iterable.

Don't get confused - my_list = my_list + another_list is not equivalent to += - it gives you a brand new list assigned to my_list.

Time Complexity

Append has constant time complexity, O(1).

Extend has time complexity, O(k).

Iterating through the multiple calls to append adds to the complexity, making it equivalent to that of extend, and since extend's iteration is implemented in C, it will always be faster if you intend to append successive items from an iterable onto a list.

Performance

You may wonder what is more performant, since append can be used to achieve the same outcome as extend. The following functions do the same thing:

def append(alist, iterable):
    for item in iterable:
        alist.append(item)

def extend(alist, iterable):
    alist.extend(iterable)

So let's time them:

import timeit

>>> min(timeit.repeat(lambda: append([], "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")))
2.867846965789795
>>> min(timeit.repeat(lambda: extend([], "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")))
0.8060121536254883

Addressing a comment on timings

A commenter said:

Perfect answer, I just miss the timing of comparing adding only one element

Do the semantically correct thing. If you want to append all elements in an iterable, use extend. If you're just adding one element, use append.

Ok, so let's create an experiment to see how this works out in time:

def append_one(a_list, element):
    a_list.append(element)

def extend_one(a_list, element):
    """creating a new list is semantically the most direct
    way to create an iterable to give to extend"""
    a_list.extend([element])

import timeit

And we see that going out of our way to create an iterable just to use extend is a (minor) waste of time:

>>> min(timeit.repeat(lambda: append_one([], 0)))
0.2082819009956438
>>> min(timeit.repeat(lambda: extend_one([], 0)))
0.2397019260097295

We learn from this that there's nothing gained from using extend when we have only one element to append.

Also, these timings are not that important. I am just showing them to make the point that, in Python, doing the semantically correct thing is doing things the Right Way™.

It's conceivable that you might test timings on two comparable operations and get an ambiguous or inverse result. Just focus on doing the semantically correct thing.

Conclusion

We see that extend is semantically clearer, and that it can run much faster than append, when you intend to append each element in an iterable to a list.

If you only have a single element (not in an iterable) to add to the list, use append.

Answer 3

An English dictionary define the words append and extend as:

append: add (something) to the end of a written document.
extend: make larger. Enlarge or expand

---

With that knowledge, now let's understand

1) The difference between append and extend

append:

• Appends any Python object as-is to the end of the list (i.e. as a last element in the list).
• The resulting list may be nested and contain heterogeneous elements (i.e. list, string, tuple, dictionary, set, etc.)

extend:

• Accepts any iterable as its argument and makes the list larger.
• The resulting list is always one dimensional list (i.e. no nesting) and it may contain heterogeneous elements in it (e.g. characters, integers, float) as a result of applying list(iterable).

2) Similarity between append and extend

• Both takes exactly one argument.
• Both modify the list in-place.
• As a result, both returns None.

---

Example

lis = [1, 2, 3]

# 'extend' is equivalent to this
lis = lis + list(iterable)

# 'append' simply appends its argument as the last element to the list
# as long as the argument is a valid Python object
lis.append(object)

Answer 4

extend(L) extends the list by appending all the items in the given list L.

>>> a
[1, 2, 3]
a.extend([4)  #is eqivalent of a[len(a):] = [4]
>>>a
[1, 2, 3, 4]
a =[1,2,3]
>>> a
[1, 2, 3]
>>> a[len(a):] = [4]
>>> a
[1, 2, 3, 4]

Answer 5

An interesting point that has been hinted, but not explained, is that extend is faster than append. For any loop that has append inside should be considered to be replaced by list.extend(processed_elements).

Bear in mind that apprending new elements might result in the realloaction of the whole list to a better location in memory. If this is done several times because we are appending 1 element at a time, overall performance suffers. In this sense, list.extend is analogous to "".join(stringlist).

Answer 6

append(object) - Updates the list by adding an object to the list.

x = [20]
# List passed to the append(object) method is treated as a single object.
x.append([21, 22, 23])
# Hence the resultant list length will be 2
print(x)
--> [20, [21, 22, 23]]

extend(list) - Essentially concatenates two lists.

x = [20]
# The parameter passed to extend(list) method is treated as a list.
# Eventually it is two lists being concatenated.
x.extend([21, 22, 23])
# Here the resultant list's length is 4
print(x)
[20, 21, 22, 23]