Flattening a shallow list in Python [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How to make a flat list out of list of lists? 39 answers

Is there a simple way to flatten a list of iterables with a list comprehension, or failing that, what would you all consider to be the best way to flatten a shallow list like this, balancing performance and readability?

I tried to flatten such a list with a nested list comprehension, like this:

[image for image in menuitem for menuitem in list_of_menuitems]

But I get in trouble of the NameError variety there, because the name 'menuitem' is not defined. After googling and looking around on Stack Overflow, I got the desired results with a reduce statement:

reduce(list.__add__, map(lambda x: list(x), list_of_menuitems))

But this method is fairly unreadable because I need that list(x) call there because x is a Django QuerySet object.

Conclusion:

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this question. Here is a summary of what I learned. I'm also making this a community wiki in case others want to add to or correct these observations.

My original reduce statement is redundant and is better written this way:

>>> reduce(list.__add__, (list(mi) for mi in list_of_menuitems))

This is the correct syntax for a nested list comprehension (Brilliant summary dF!):

>>> [image for mi in list_of_menuitems for image in mi]

But neither of these methods are as efficient as using itertools.chain:

>>> from itertools import chain
>>> list(chain(*list_of_menuitems))

And as @cdleary notes, it's probably better style to avoid * operator magic by using chain.from_iterable like so:

>>> chain = itertools.chain.from_iterable([[1,2],[3],[5,89],[],[6]])
>>> print(list(chain))
>>> [1, 2, 3, 5, 89, 6]

Answer 1

In Python 2.6, using chain.from_iterable():

>>> from itertools import chain
>>> list(chain.from_iterable(mi.image_set.all() for mi in h.get_image_menu()))

It avoids creating of intermediate list.

Answer 2

If you have to flat more complicated list with not iterable elements or with depth more than 2 you can use following function:

def flat_list(list_to_flat):
    if not isinstance(list_to_flat, list):
        yield list_to_flat
    else:
        for item in list_to_flat:
            yield from flat_list(item)

It will return generator object which you can convert to list with list() function. Notice that yield from syntax available from python3.3 but you can use explicit iteration instead.
Example:

>>> a = [1, [2, 3], [1, [2, 3, [1, [2, 3]]]]]
>>> print(list(flat_list(a)))
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]

Answer 3

The easiest way to achieve this in either Python 2 or 3 is to use the morph library using pip install morph.

The code is:

import morph

list = [[1,2],[3],[5,89],[],[6]]
flattened_list = morph.flatten(list)  # returns [1, 2, 3, 5, 89, 6]

Answer 4

This version is a generator.Tweak it if you want a list.

def list_or_tuple(l):
    return isinstance(l,(list,tuple))
## predicate will select the container  to be flattened
## write your own as required
## this one flattens every list/tuple


def flatten(seq,predicate=list_or_tuple):        
    ## recursive generator 
    for i in seq:
        if predicate(seq):
            for j in flatten(i):
                yield j
        else:
            yield i

You can add a predicate ,if want to flatten those which satisfy a condition

Taken from python cookbook

Answer 5

Here is a version working for multiple levels of list using collectons.Iterable:

import collections

def flatten(o):
    result = []
    for i in o:
        if isinstance(i, collections.Iterable):
            result.extend(flatten(i))
        else:
            result.append(i)
    return result